Barack Obama is secretly negotiating the largest international trade agreement in history, and the mainstream media in the United States is almost completely ignoring it. If this treaty is adopted, it will be the most important step toward a one world economic system that we have ever seen. The name of this treaty is “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and the text of the treaty is so closely guarded that not even members of Congress know what is in it. Right now, there are 12 countries that are part of the negotiations: the United States, Canada, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. These nations have a combined population of 792 million people and account for an astounding 40 percent of the global economy. And it is hoped that the EU, China and India will eventually join as well. This is potentially the most dangerous economic treaty of our lifetimes, and yet there is very little political debate about it in this country.

Even though Congress is not being allowed to see what is in the treaty, Barack Obama wants Congress to give him fast track negotiating authority. What that means is that Congress would essentially trust Obama to negotiate a good treaty for us. Congress could vote the treaty up or down, but would not be able to amend or filibuster it.

Of course now the Republicans control both houses of Congress. If they are foolish enough to blindly give Barack Obama so much power, they should all immediately resign.

…The latest Hubbub in Economic disasters waiting to happen is the Double Super Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement which Obama-sama is Front Man for, which from all indications appears to be something like NAFTA on Steroids. I say “from all indications” because nobody seems to know precisely what is in this agreement, not even the lower level of Puppets in Congress. The general idea is well known though, which is to establish yet another bigger and more comprehensive “Free Trade” Zone amongst a whole bevy of countries surrounding the Pacific Sewer, from Chile and Peru on the Left Coast of South America up around through the FSoA and back down the other side through Japan to SE Asia and on to Oz and Kiwiland. The “hope” here amongst the Globalist Pigmen who are drafting this thing up is that China too will buy in here to this NEW & IMPROVED agreement designed basically to make Corporate Oligarchs even richer than they already are while sucking the last of whatever resource wealth is still left anywhere around this ring out of the ground and driving down the rest of the population into even more desperate poverty than so far achieved here with NAFTA and the rest of the Globalization meme.

The Buzzword here is “FREE TRADE”, and who can be against something FREE, right? You the Konsumer are going to BENEFIT from still more FREE TRADE! The Low, Low Prices Every Day at Walmart will get even LOWER!…

“When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illumined faith, and fear into love. Despite statements to the contrary, Masonry is a religion seeking to unite God and man by elevating its initiates to that level of consciousness whereon they can behold with clarified vision the workings of the Great Architect of the Universe. From age to age the vision of a perfect civilization is preserved as the ideal for mankind.” ~ Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

In northeast Georgia near the border with South Carolina, lies the town of Elberton, county seat of Elbert County and the self proclaimed “Granite Capital of the World.” Elbert County is so rich in granite that it supports over 40 active quarries and more granite construction per square mile than you are likely to see elsewhere. There is an excellent chance that regardless of where you live in the FSoA, there’s a chunk of Elbert County near you. Over the course of the past century, Elberton granite has been exported all over the country and the world in the form of buildings, monuments, countertops and the ubiquitous gravestone.

What is brick where you live is granite in Elberton. Homes, road signs, banks, the community center, the local jail and even high school football stadium are all constructed out of the sparkling local rock. Geologists describe it as a combination of feldspar, mica and quartz. Not surprisingly, little Elberton, with a population under 5,000, probably has the highest concentration of monuments in the world.

On a tall hilltop in Elbert County, Georgia, stands a large granite monument. Five giant stones, astronomically aligned, support a common capstone. Each is engraved with Guides, or commandments, in eight different languages.

These are The Georgia Guidestones. Though relatively unknown, this unique monument was erected with little fanfare, but continues to fan the flames of endless rumor and speculation. Some see in it an important link to an occult hierarchy that dominates our world, others to the Illuminati, others to Freemasonry or the Rosicrucians. The stones stand idle, and readily accept whatever images and interpretations projected upon them. But what do we really know?

I had started a draft of this article, and hoped to drive to Georgia to photograph it myself before publishing it. But this latest odd wrinkle, and the speculation it has generated, led me to cut it loose now.

The monument

The Georgia Guidestones are a monument of four vertical granite slabs, on which are carved ten “commandments” in eight languages. Supposedly adherence to these will ostensibly help mankind usher in a “New Age of Reason.”

The first commandment? Maintaining the world population under 500 million people. Which means 92 per cent of you will have to oblige by getting off the planet. Whether these stones are a proclamation or a warning, and whether or not they are the works of a small group of eccentrics or an occult secret society, one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to observe the assaults on the well being of ordinary people, on standards of living, on the earth’s very climate, on vectors of disease and man-made toxic threat, on real food, fresh water and clean air to connect the dots and posit the likelihood of a “Great Culling” to accomplish such an objective.

The monument itself, sometimes optimistically known as the American Stonehenge, is almost 20 feet high and is made of six granite slabs, weighing 240,000 pounds. The most astonishing detail of the monument is less the size and more the, “Ten Rules for an “Age of Reason.”

These “guides” touch upon subjects typically associated with the “New World Order”, including massive depopulation, a single world government, the introduction of a new type of spirituality, etc. The authors of those rules have remained anonymous in spite of several investigations to uncover the sponsors. But before disappearing into the Georgia mists, this mysterious group left a text explaining the reasoning behind the rules, which purports to describe an ideal world, as envisioned by occult Secret Societies. Let the reader make what he or she will of the stone’s declarations.

As you can see, the guidelines call for a drastic reduction of the world population, the adoption of new a world language, the creation of a world court and vague allusions to eugenics. In other words, a blueprint for a New World Order.

“World democracy was the secret dream of the great classical philosophers. Toward the accomplishment of this greatest of all human ends they outlined programs of education, religion, and social conduct directed to the ultimate achievement of a practical and universal brotherhood. And in order to accomplish their purposes more effectively, these ancient scholars bound themselves with certain mystic ties into a broad confraternity. In Egypt, Greece, India, and China, the State Mysteries came into existence. Orders of initiated priest-philosophers were formed as a sovereign body to instruct, advise, and direct the rulers of the States.”-Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America

At this point, you might well be saying, “All well and good for you to wrap your head in tinfoil. So some southern cranks put together a pot on money and erected some standing stones. It doesn’t necessarily mean what you intend, and certainly does not necessarily indicate the work of a secret cabal…”

Indeed. Most days, we might ordinarily agree with you. But to do so would be to overlook the single most significant piece of evidence left behind, the above mentioned text, easily found in The Georgia Guidestone Guidebook, a 50-page pamphlet published by the Elberton Granite Finishing Company, which erected the monument. In a straightforward manner, and describing their motives in great detail, the authors of the monument make it clear that they do seek the creation of a New World Order.

So feel free to belay the finger-circles-at-the-temples just yet.

From the booklet:

“It is very probable that humanity now possesses the knowledge needed to establish an effective world government. In some way that knowledge must he widely seeded in the consciousness of all mankind. Very soon the hearts of our human family must be touched and warmed so we will welcome a global rule of reason.

‘The group consciousness of our race is blind, perverse, and easily distracted by trivia when it should be focused on fundamentals. We are entering a critical era. Population pressures will soon create political and economic crisis throughout the world. These will make more difficult and at the same time more needed the building of a rational world society.

“A first step will be to convince a doubting world that such a society is now possible. Let us keep in view enduring appeals to the collective reason of humanity. Let us draw attention to the basic problems. Let us establish proper priorities. We must order our home here on earth before we reach for the stars.

“Human reason is now awakening to its strength. It is the most powerful agency yet released in the unfolding of life on our planet. We must make humanity aware that acceptance of compassionate, enlightened reason will let us control our destiny within the limits inherent in our nature.

“It is difficult to seed wisdom in closed human minds. Cultural inertias are not easily overcome. Unfolding world events and the sad record of our race dramatize the shortcomings of traditional agencies in governing human affairs. The approaching crisis may make mankind willing to accept a system of world law which will stress the responsibility of individual nations in regulating internal affairs, and which will assist them in the peaceful management of international frictions.

‘With such a system we could eliminate war, We could provide every person an opportunity to seek a life of purpose and fulfillment.

“There are alternatives to Armageddon. They are attainable. But they will not happen without coordinated efforts by millions of dedicated people in all nations of the earth.

“We, the sponsors of The Georgia Guidestones®, are a small group of Americans who wish to focus attention on problems central to the present quandary of humanity. We have a simple message for other human beings, now and in the future. We believe it contains self-evident truths, and we intend no bias for a particular creed or philosophy. Yet our message is in some areas controversial. We have chosen to remain anonymous in order to avoid debate and contention which might confuse our meaning, and which might delay a considered review of our thoughts. We believe that our precepts are sound. They must stand on their own merits.

Your mileage may very, but this sounds pretty new-world-ordery to me.

How Did the Guidestones get there? And by whom?

The unveiling of the Georgia Guidestones. Could one of these people be the mysterious R.C. Christian?

The story of the ordering of the Guidestones is recounted thus in the official guidebook.

“What started out as a usual Friday afternoon in mid-summer has ended in the production and erection of one of the world’s most unusual monuments, produced under the most unusual conditions. Joe Fendley, president of Elbert Granite Finishing Company, Inc. in Elberton, Georgia,was spending this Friday afternoon in June 1979 like he spends most Friday afternoons … studying his weekly reports and generally closing up shop for a weekend … and then it all started.

A neatly dressed man walked into Fendley’s Tate Street office and said he wanted to buy a monument. Since everyone else in the office was busy, Fendley decided to talk to the stranger himself and explained that his company does not sell directly to the public, but only on a wholesale basis.

Not to be discouraged, the middle-aged man who identified himself only as Mr. Robert C. Christian, said he wanted to know the cost of building a monument to the conservation of mankind and began telling Fendley what type of monument he wanted. With this he outlined the size in metric measurements.

Fendley admitted that his first reaction to Mr. Christian was not very good, but after listening for about 20 minutes and learning the massive size of the monument he wished to purchase and have erected, Fendley decided he should take this man seriously.”

If the name R.C. Christian was simply a meaningless pseudonym, why would it engraved on to the monument for posterity? And “pseudonym” misspelled? Some allege that the name “R.C. Christian” is a clear reference to Christian Rosenkreuz whose English name is Christian Rose Cross, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian Order, and thus a hint for posterity.

Is the message of the stones a cynical one predicting, or urging, the elimination of 12 of 13 people currently alive? The last rule of the Guidestones, “Be not a cancer on the earth – leave room for nature – leave room for nature” is a deeply troubling comparison of human life on earth to cancer. It does not take a great deal of speculation to infer what sort of person would view the great majority of humanity thusly. If you are one of the elite, and assured of your place in the “lifeboat,” it becomes easier to rationalize the extinction of nearly all of the world’s population.

Since their erection in 1980, the stones have often been defaced with red paint and epithets. Locals come out to clean and restore them. Little is clear other than the swirling speculation, but the stones will clearly outlive the defacers, their frustrations and their red paint. Whether the Stones will continue to exist in the planned-for future envisioned by those who erected them, to deliver their cautionary message, seems assured.

***

Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, articles and spittle-flecked invective on this site, and quit barking and got off the porch long enough to be briefly active in the Occupy movement. He shares a home in Southeastern Virginia with Contrary and is grateful each day for the life he has with her, and that he is not yet taking a dirt nap.

Who has the better Tan?

George Hamilton Christine LaGarde

Snippet:

Newz for today is that Christine LaGarde, winner of the George Hamilton award for Best Suntan and current head of the IMF can see the day coming where the IMF will move it’s headquarters to Beijing, because the IMF Charter has it they are supposed to set up their main Shop in whatever country is funding them with the most Funny Money. Apparently Christine is suffering a high degree of Sun Stroke and is trying to jawbone the Chinese into funding the IMF, which is basically dead broke with everybody else in this Kabuki.

The IMF is one of several institutions set up by the Illuminati in the aftermath of WWII to manage the flow of Funny Money out to the Little People of the World. You have the World Bank also, and then of course the Big Daddy of them all, the Bank for International Settlements in Basel Switzerland, better known as the “Central Bank of Central Banks”. These folks determine the quantity of money available, and who gets it. It is ALL debt money, everybody has to BORROW it, including the TBTF banks and Tycoons too. Then it gets pitched around in Markets which are always thoroughly manipulated, as on corporation battles another, one country battles another and one tycoon battles another in the great game of Capitalism, which in essence is gambling on debt OTHER people will get the bill for..

…3- Daily Bizarre Weather Story– Latest is Sandstorms in China, but of course you get the regular 500 year Floods occurring every year, F5 Tornados flattening trailer parks at HFT rates, “Perfect Storms” hitting everywhere from Atlantic City to the Phillipines and HaBoobs bigger than Raquel Welch’s Boobs were before they went saggy…

Few who are paying attention to world events, through a lens more precise than the Main Stream Media (MSM), would deny that the vast majority of humans are being badly abused by their leadership in a variety of venues ranging from local, regional, national, and international politicians and bureaucrats, financial managers, corporate controllers, religious leaders, media moguls and warlords.

The vast majority of humans appear to be oblivious to this abuse and passively accept what is being done to them. Why is that? In one word – conditioning.

The vastly increased access to information that the internet enabled is responsible for a large number of people at least becoming aware of this abuse. However even among this more aware group, taking effective action to stop the abuse is sorely lacking. Why is that? In one word – conditioning.

There is a much smaller group that are proactively attempting to counter the abuse through group protest but they are losing the struggle. Why is that? In one word – conditioning.

At 68 I am getting on in years. I have lived a full life and have had the time to reflect back on my path through life. As a result I have come to realize that most of the conditioning we are all subject to did not incapacitate me nearly as much as it did most people. I believe the realizations I have come to regarding my seeming immunity to conditioning are a necessary foundation required for people to free themselves from the tyranny that enslaves them.

With that hope in mind I would like to share some experiences from my youth that illustrate the problem (conditioning), and hint at the solution.

Our conditioning begins at the moment of our birth. Although they are not conscious of it, our parents, and family members, begin the process. Our parents have been conditioned before us and all their ‘conditioned’ traditions are passed on to us without considering their consequences. How often have you heard the excuse? “That’s just the way things are, get over it!” There is a great book by Wilhelm Reich called, “The Function of the Orgasm”, that explains the form of, and reasons for, this early in life conditioning. Yes our sexuality plays a large role.

It is widely accepted that our late childhood, and early adulthood, years are our formative ones and also when we are in our prime both intellectually and physically. Historically people took full responsibility for managing their own lives much earlier in their lives, during what we consider late childhood. There were once 14 year old admirals that oversaw large naval forces. The commitment of marriage and raising a family began much earlier. Pioneers struck out to discover and populate new mysterious lands before they reached their teens.

The most rigid and destructive conditioning is imposed on us during our schooling. Our schooling is starting earlier and lasting much longer than previously in history and while we are being ‘schooled’ we are not considered full adults with the responsibilities and freedoms such status implies.

Why is that? Could it be that control in our society is much more rigid than ever before? Those that control us realize that a rebellion of youth is the most dangerous kind. How better to minimize the impact of people in their prime than by keeping their status at ‘children’ with little access to power until well past their prime years? If people cave in to ‘slavehood’ during their prime years, how likely are they to rebel once they are past their prime; especially if they are burdened with excessive debt from their education?

I will only touch on the subject of our schooling lightly here and point out what I see as the most debilitating habits we are taught. The subject is an immense one covered well by people such as John Taylor Gatto, author of, “The Underground History of American Education”.

Disclaimer: I quit school in the early 60’s while in grade 9, at age 14. The reason being I felt I was being made dumber instead of smarter. My parent’s response was, “if you don’t go to school we will not support you.” I left home then and took on responsibility for my own life.

Even though I chose a different path than most I did not really understand intellectually why I did what I did then until recently, about a half a century later. What I did then, I did intuitively, rather than logically while accepting full responsibility for the outcome.

I first spent a few years hoboing around Canada taking whatever work I could find whenever I needed it. No job was too menial or too challenging to accept.

At 17 I took on a job that turned my life around and led to my conditioning mostly sliding off me.

This job was as a fire lookout man with the British Columbia (Canada) Forest Service. For a number of years I worked and lived on remote mountain tops, by myself, for 3 to 4 months each year. Spending that much time completely alone, and removed from civilization, especially during my formative years, had a profound effect on my perceptions about life as a human being and how I fit into society.

I didn’t have a camera in those days so the image above, which closely represents my situation, is used to illustrate the setting.

Below is a photograph of myself taken a few years later in the same general area I spent time on the lookouts. The other photos interspersed in this essay are taken by myself as I explored the mountains near my home after my lookout years.

In current society peer pressure during childhood, and early adulthood, is immense. To survive in this setting we must pay close attention to others around us for clues regarding what is and is not acceptable. Because of this pressure the bulk of our energy goes into human interactions and we are pretty much oblivious to everything but our immediate environment. “Use it or lose it”, is sage advice. Because of concentrating on human relations during their formative years most people have little if any connection to the natural world.

Try to imagine what people would be like if, as youngsters, they spent time exploring and living in nature, while being responsible for their own survival and actions, instead of hanging out at the mall or partying with their pals.

Is it fair to say that those that hang with the crowd are unlikely to be aware of, or able to understand, large scale events not part of their immediate environment?

What about someone who is tasked with surviving in the greater world using only their own skills? Would they stand a better chance of grasping what is going on?

Is this phenomena related to the common use of a ‘rite of manhood’ by many cultures where young adults leave the security of their group to face the wilderness on their own?

Do the majority of people in modern societies never go through this enabling rite of passage and instead go from the security of their parent’s care to the security of the big brother state? Does this explain why some people never seem to reach adulthood?

Substantial time on the lookout, without peer pressure, made me realize how confining trying to fit into the crowd is. Most people don’t even sense this pressure because it is all they know. It’s like the air we breathe. It’s just there until it isn’t, then we die; unless we are prepared for an airless environment.

Most people also don’t realize how much of their time and energy it takes to be ‘social’. Being removed from ‘socializing’ is enormously stressful if it is all you know.

Many aspiring lookout men needed to come down off the mountains prematurely because they could not stand being alone. Those that adjusted to the isolation, came to treasure the freedom of being comfortable for extended periods with just their own company. The amount of time that then becomes available for other, possibly more worthwhile pursuits, is substantial.

In the forefront of these benefits is having the time to look inside yourself without constantly being subjected to the opinion of others. Building friendships takes time and effort and becoming your own friend is no exception. Most of us never get the opportunity to do this.

Those that desire to control human behavior understand that people that are not comfortable with themself are much more susceptible to being controlled because they are lonely and need to seek comfort and friendship outside themselves. Virtually every sales campaign, ranging from that of the door to door salesmen to world leaders, is then enabled to easily sell you a bill of goods by convincing you that what they have to offer is going to become your best friend and make your life less lonely.

Short excursions, or holidays into nature, most often with others, fitted into a busy schedule, do little to increase our awareness of the greater reality that humans exist within. Thanks to modern technology very few of these excursions actually take people far from the human controlled environment they are conditioned to.

It is one thing to climb to the top of a mountain, conquer it, and then immediately return to civilization. It is something totally different to stay in that wilderness environment for extended periods with the time to come to know those other species that are at home in those environs. It makes one realize that humans are not the be all and end all of life on earth. Humility is born which serves us very well. In this environment one soon comes to realize those species include the earth itself. Seeing the constant breathing of weather and daily and seasonal shifts of energies makes one realize everything is made of the same stuff and ‘lives’ in it’s own unique way.

To assume the earth is a lifeless blob which we can abuse without conscious consequence is a very risky proposition.

Most people’s lives are lived out within an environment created by and for humans. Most; and more all the time, live in an urban environment.

When they holiday people generally take some technological means of travel which quickly takes them to the other place of human habitation they wish to holiday in. Because people’s travel experience is so brief, and misses the detail of the ground they pass over, most of which currently has no human habitants, it is easy for them to agree, when told by ‘experts’ that human overpopulation is a crisis.

Yes there are many urban places on the planet that suffer from overpopulation, and many more places on the planet that are being strip-mined to support those urban centers, but all in all there is an enormous amount of free space, capable of supporting humans, if only they were able to tear themselves away from the social centers they now depend on and cluster in.

In the early 1990’s while transitioning from life in Canada to life in Mexico I drove between Canada and Mexico every second week for 3 years while gradually weaning my clients off the services I had previously offered. I was a workaholic and saw the time on the road as my own and enjoyed it by taking different highways almost every trip. Eventually I was able to drive between Mexico and Canada while only passing through a very few towns, all smaller than about 10,000 people. Most of the distance on these trips was spent on very remote highways with no other traffic to speak of.

I can say definitively that between, Canada, the USA and Mexico there is enough uninhabited fertile land to accommodate the whole world without the residents being able to see their nearest neighbor.

This vision assumes we overcome our condition of needing to be part of the herd clustering in vast hordes, and also manage to disempower the laws of those that enslave us that currently make this land unavailable to us.

Humans are far more difficult to control if they live in small clusters, all over the place, while paying little or no attention to the MSM. The propagandists can then not create a single message that will motive the whole herd of humans to act identically by broadcasting their one piece of propaganda from a single location that reaches everyone.

Propaganda still works but it must be tailored properly to fit each unique situation in order to get consistent results. If there is no central broadcasting service the message must also be taken to each unique location individually. This is an impossible situation for our rulers and is the reason we are all so heavily conditioned to….

Need to be in close quarters with other humans.

Need the approval of others.

Think alike.

Think we must be/are part of a team.

Become isolated emotionally from ourselves and each other, even while packed on top of each other, so only big brother can offer us comfort.

Desire specialized knowledge which results in only being able to survive as part of the ‘urban’ team.

To desire a ‘carrot’ of reward that only ‘winning’, at any cost(?), within the crowd can present.

Depend on centralized services, especially sources of energy.

Depend on the rule of ‘human’ law to protect us from each other.

The most destructive conditioning takes place in our schools, right at the time we are most susceptible to it, during our formative years. During that period we have little experience of our own to compare to what we are told, and raising questions about the validity of the taught ‘truth’ is ruthlessly punished, in order to force us to depend on the wisdom of others instead of our own intuition.

We are ruthlessly regimented to follow orders so that we eventually become incapable of thinking for ourselves and become dependent on the ‘boss’ to do our thinking for us. The intellectual box we become stuck within is then defined by the boss.

Specialization in training, and limiting access to information, (compartmentalization) is critical to our conditioning. If we cannot think for ourselves, and only understand part of the puzzle, and are incapable of deducing or intuiting answers to unknowns, we are trapped within our dependence on others.

I have personally met a number of world shaker class intellectuals that are extremely brilliant in their own field but figuratively can’t tie their own shoe laces. This situation is not accidental. If only the boss has the full picture, the boss becomes the only one who can act effectively. Everyone else then becomes totally dependent on the Boss. Specialization has its place but having a well rounded toolkit of lifeskills is essential to individual freedom.

Away from civilization, where the boss is not handy to hold your hand, is a disaster waiting to happen if you cannot think for yourself. Then unless you quickly learn to identify problems before they destroy you, and also learn to fix problems you can’t avoid intuitively, without an instruction manually from the boss, you will not survive long.

Lack of education, much time spent away from conditioning influences, and conditioned humans, has changed fundamentally how I solve problems.

When faced with a problem a conditioned human will go through the channels of historical solutions until they find one that works for them.

Instead I consider the elements of the problem in place, try to intuit the workings of the device/situation, and then pinpoint what is going wrong and consider what might fix it. No manual is needed; just the ability to think a situation through for myself.

Using only this skill I have managed to live my whole life well, if not always comfortably, while being considered an essential resource by many people with far more education than myself, even in areas they have expertise in.

No one is perfect and you will make mistakes when you think for yourself. Mistakes are often painful but if you accept the possibility of making mistakes, and are willing to learn from them when you make them, you will eventually become a very robust and capable person. What doesn’t break you strengthens you.

If you are afraid of making mistakes you are stuck on the safe (?) road built by our bosses. You still might not be safe but at least you can then blame your mistakes on someone else.

I have learned far more from my mistakes than from my successes. I am now very thankful for my mistakes, even though some were very painful to navigate.

This essay is getting long so I will end it with one last point about what I learned from my life on the lookouts.

While we are thrust into the middle of ongoing intense personal inter-relationships, especially during our formative years, our attention remains strongly focused on each interaction as it occurs and the rest of the world passes us by unnoticed. We see the trees but are oblivious of the forest. This is most often a habit we carry throughout life and it is a very dangerous one in our propaganda filled world. We see each piece of new propaganda as a standalone piece of information. We have no perspective to see if how it fits into the forest makes sense. We are then at the mercy of those that would deceive us for their own purpose. All they need to do is grab our attention and they can then do with us as they like.

On a lookout tasked with quickly finding dangerous anomalies, within a vast vista of forests, becoming focused on each tree individually is not productive and makes it impossible to see the whole picture. A good lookout man eventually learns to quickly scan vast vistas without focusing on anything in particular. Taking this approach to finding required data points, such as suspicious smoke, allows our intuition to come to our aid. It always amazes me how glaringly anomalies stand out when using this method.

It works just as well in any other environment, including researching on the internet. When surrounded by questionable ‘news/propaganda’ the fires stick out much more obviously when we also are aware of the apparently unrelated surrounding information that is part of webscape. The ‘trees’ of propaganda do not distract us from seeing the whole situation. If there’s no smoke there probably isn’t a fire. Our intuition can see the difference even though we logically can’t. Following our intuition instead of remaining focused on the propaganda leads us to the information that will then allow us to make sense of the situation.

Although my prognosis of our situation appears very gloomy I am not pessimistic. I see light at the end of the tunnel.

For those who managed to slog through to this point thank you for your attention.

Peter

More thoughts about Conditioning (not included in the original essay above).

My essay about conditioning only painted part of the picture. To help understand the situation more fully it is important to see the whole picture.

What I described previously is the conditioning that influences what we term the masses or those without power. This conditioning is put in place and controlled by the ruling class. It is easy to assume that because of their power and control those of the ruling class are not themselves being conditioned. This is a fallacy.

A study of history clearly demonstrates that throughout history humanity has been in a constant struggle within itself which takes place between a few strong rulers who gain power and subsequently use that power disproportionately for their own benefit. The larger the discrepancy between the quality of life of the rulers and everyone else, the more destructive the relationship becomes.

During my life, because of the skills I have to offer, I have had a few brief glimpses into the personal lives of some of the small circle of rulers that control the condition of humanity. They mostly have names we have never heard of because their employees do their work for them and are the ones the public see and blame for the harm that is occurring.

What I saw behind the curtain was surprising but obvious once it was seen. The conditioning we the masses go through is nothing compared to the conditioning of these elites. The same applies to the trusted employees that work directly for this inner circle.

Looking back through history it becomes obvious there is continuity in the family lines of the ruling class as generation after generation of the same families take over the reins of power in turn.

As with the majority of us the elite’s conditioning begins at the moment of their birth and is initially provided by their parents and family as translated through their hired help. This conditioning is far more rigid and destructive to individuality than that outside the ruling class. The elite’s privileged position is totally dependent on each generation in turn continuing to exercise the power that keeps them all on the top.

The pressure we the masses get from our parents to better ourselves by becoming doctors and lawyers is nothing compared to the pressure put on the children of the elite to ruthlessly manage the masses. With few exceptions those in the elite live cloistered lives and rarely relate extensively with individuals that have not been conditioned identically to them other than in master / servant situations.

The schooling for the elites, and their trusted inner circle of employees, is far more rigid in enforcing subservience to their common cause than the masses education. This is because the loss of a servant is far less critical to the cause than the loss of someone in a position of responsibility. I believe that the rituals used by elite secret societies such as skull & bones at Yale University are designed for initiates to demonstrate to their superiors their willingness to be subservient to the cause even when faced with degrading demands. This subservient position is demeaning for individuals with large egos and probably translates directly to their in turn taking out their anger and frustration on those less powerful than themselves. A circle of abuse then radiates outwards as each level of abused takes out their pain on the power below themselves.

The conceptual box previous generations of elites have trapped their children in is much smaller than the box we the masses inhabit. The people I met appeared to me totally lost. On the surface many appear bubbly and satisfied and feeling on top of the world but this facade is only skin deep. It is obvious that deep down they are deathly afraid of confronting reality. Substance abuse and suicide is a large component of this lifestyle.

To my understanding the relationship between that of the elite and the masses is identical to that of the predator / prey relationship commonly found in/between other species than humans.

The elite are conditioned by their history to be predators and the masses are conditioned by their history to be prey. Those masses that seek the rewards seeming to be available to the elite must become predators in order to join those rarefied circles.

The Bible suggests through the allegory of the Garden of Eden that the predator / prey relationship is not the only possible relationship between individuals. It further suggests we humans fell from grace once we adopted this predatory way of life.

As has been shown by history many times power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It is obvious to me that for there to be peace within humanity power, and the need for it, must be removed.

The Big Newz last week on the Economic Front was the Jobs Report from the Bureau of Lies & Statistics, which now has the FSoA UE Rate down to a remarkable 6.7%! We are doing FANTASTIC! This is down from Double Digit UE Rates around 11% following the Financial Crack-Up of 2008. Happy Daze are HERE AGAIN!

Curious why despite the huge miss in payrolls the unemployment rate tumbled from 7.0% to 6.7%? The reason is because in December the civilian labor force did what it usually does in the New Normal: it dropped from 155.3 million to 154.9 million, which means the labor participation rate just dropped to a fresh 35 year low, hitting levels not seen since 1978, at 62.8% down from 63.0%.

And the piece de resistance: Americans not in the labor force exploded higher by 535,000 to a new all time high 91.8 million.

The jobless, laborless recovery continues to steam on.

ZH of course highlights the OBVIOUS canard being pitched out here, which goes to the Denominator in the Equation, who the BLS counts as UE and Looking for Work. The UE measured rate by the BLS obviously went down tremendously as soon as Da Federal Goobermint dropped millions off from Extended UE bennies that were running 99 Weeks. Once you have used up your Bennies, you no longer are counted as looking for a job, whether you found one or not by the time the bennies ran out.

At the same time, the “Labor Participation Rate”, the percentage of the population who actually has a Job continues to drop here off the map. Are we expected to believe all these folks no longer need or want a job?

Part of the reason for this is Demographics. Overall the population is aging, and more of the Boomers Retire each year, and at least for now can collect SS and whatever Pension is due them, at least if they were not working for the City of Detroit for the last 30 years. However, we still do have Immigration going on, and we still do have homegrown young folks graduating from High School and College. The percentage of either class of people able to find “Jobs” in our current economy continues to drop here, and their hopes for the Future drop with them.

Of course this is NOTHING compared to what is ongoing in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy these days, where Youth

Unemployment is reaching into the +50% category. In a society where having a JOB to earn MONEY is essential if you expect to stay out of Prison or not live in a cardboard box on the street, I can’t think of any better recipe for Social Unrest than these kind of UE numbers.

If you are older here and go UE, even if you are not QUITE yet eligible for SS, decent chance you have some savings to live off, or maybe a paid off McMansion you can sell and live off the proceeds in a trailer park while you wait for SS to kick in. Or you can try and get SSDI a bit earlier than 62 for regular SS retirement FRNs.

So there is still some Safety Net here for Job losses, which goes a long way toward explaining why we do not yet see the kind of social unrest already ongoing in Greece and Spain. How long this can continue to play here remains an open question of course.

So, the bottom line here on all of this ongoing collapse nonsense revolves around the JOBS, which have been since the Industrial Revolution the means by which MOST people get some MONEY to then be able to buy food, pay Rent to the Rentier Class and buy energy with which to run the carz they need to get to work and participate in said Industrial Economy. Jobs disappear, the ability to participate disappears with it.

What ARE the jobs of the Industrial Economy though? Well, for a while during the early Growth Phase here in the FSoA, those jobs were Industrial Factory type work, as we provided hardware to run both WWI and WWII. We had copious sources of local Cheap Energy to run the Factories back then, and besides that after destroying much of the Infrastructure in Europe in both wars, it needed to be rebuilt, providing a lot of work for Factory workers here in the FSoA, where nothing got Bombed.

During the Post WWII period also, the FSoA Industrialists began the largest Public Works project in the History of Mankind, the Eisenhower Interstate. The reason was not to develop Commerce, although that came out of it as a means to Finance the project, it came from the realization by the Military arm of the Military-Industrial Complex that in order to move their Tanks and Hardware around this vast continent, they needed ROADS upon which to roll that hardware.

As a Young Lieutenant in the Army back in 1919, Dwight D Eisenhower had to move a Convoy across the old “Lincoln Highway”, which was really a Hodgepodge of paved and dirt roads, and the equipment they had got bogged down all the time. Fuel stops were vitually nonexistent, so they had to have their own Fuel trucks travelling with them to stock up at the few fuel depots that existed at the time in the more majore motros connected toa Rail line. It took WEEKS to make it across the country.

In late June 2006, a caravan of vehicles organized by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) will travel across the United States from San Francisco, California to Washington, D. C. to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Interstate Highway System.

The AASHTO Anniversary Caravan of 2006 will follow Interstate 80 much of the way. It will be retracing, in reverse, the approximate route of a famous previous expedition, the Transcontinental Army Motor Convoy, which followed the Lincoln Highway across the country from Washington to San Francisco in 1919. PHOTO (ABOVE):Soldiers pushing a disabled truck during the 1919 Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy, Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 86-19-190

The remainder of this section will describe the 1919 Army Convoy; report on its three-day trip across Illinois and relate what the 1919 Army Convoy meant for the future of American Roads.

ORIGINS AND PURPOSES OF THE 1919 ARMY CONVOY

World War I (1914-1918) was the first large scale military conflict that employed vehicles powered by the relatively new internal combustion engine. Airplanes, trucks, motorcars, and tanks were used on both sides. However, they lacked the reliability, flexibility, and capacity for moving large masses of troops or equipment over long distances on inferior European roads. The vast majority of WWI military transportation on land was done by horses and railroad trains; nevertheless, by the end of the war, most military leaders saw the potential for increased use of motorized troops and equipment in military campaigns of the future.

The end of the war also inspired the leaders of the Good Roads Movement to resume their public relations (PR) campaign to convince the public to demand better roads from state and local governments. The PR campaign had been put on hold during the 1917-1918 period while America was engaged in WWI. Early in 1919, Lincoln Highway Association leader Harry Ostermann had persuaded the War Department to conduct a transcontinental motor convoy trip from the East Coast to San Francisco on the marked route of the Lincoln Highway.

The purpose of the convoy was two fold: 1) it was to be a training exercise and 2) a test of the feasibility of the long distance movement of military men and supplies by auto and truck.

From the Good Roads Movement’s viewpoint, the convoy was meant to produce positive PR by demonstrating that long distance motor travel was possible. It was also meant to heighten awareness of existing poor roads that comprised much of the Lincoln Highway and other roads in the Unites States. Return to Top

AN EPIC JOURNEY FULL OF CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Amid much hoopla, speeches and fanfare, a 76-vehicle combined “public-private” convoy, including 56 military vehicles, 209 officers and enlisted men, and dozens of private citizens took off from the White House on July 7, 1919. (LH/MAIN STREET, p. 83).

Later that evening, the convoy was joined by two, last minute volunteer Army officers. They were Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major Sereno Brett, who were to serve as observers for the Army Tank Corps. PHOTO:Major Sereno Brett, Harvey Firestone, Jr., and Lt. Colonel Dwight Eisenhower at 1919 Army Convoy stopover at the Firestone Homestead, Columbania, Ohio, July 13, 1919. Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 70-520-3.

The convoy was to operate as if the country was at war and that an Asiatic enemy had destroyed railroad lines, bridges, and tunnels. They were also to act as if they would be traveling through enemy territory and thus, had to be self-contained and self-sustaining over the 3,250-mile route. Maintaining the illusion of being at war or being truly self-sustaining proved to be very difficult, as was the trip itself.

Among some of the military personnel, there was even doubt whether or not the convoy could actually make it across the continent. The vehicles were untested over long distances. Many sections of the Lincoln Highway were unimproved dirt roads. Finally, few military personnel; especially enlisted men, had much experience with motor vehicle driving or maintenance. Eisenhower later wrote that the trek was a genuine adventure. “We were not sure it could be accomplished at all. Nothing of the sort had ever been attempted.”

At first, in the East from Washington through Indiana, the roads were generally good but mechanical problems with the various vehicles and logistical problems slowed the convoy’s progress. Military discipline among the men also was “conspicuous by its absence,” according to one observer. About the familiarity of the men with operating trucks, Eisenhower wrote:

All drivers had claimed lengthy experience in driving trucks; some of them, it turned out, had never handled anything more advanced than a Model T. Most colored the air with expression in starting and stopping that indicated a longer association with teams of horses than with internal combustion engines. (EISENHOWER REPORT)

As the convoy (also referred to as the “train” by some) headed into Illinois and the West, road conditions along the Lincoln Highway presented serious challenges that often delayed and sometimes halted the convoy. The Highway ran on dirt roads through most of Illinois, but the weather was dry, so it was possible to cross the state in a few days. Of the roads between Illinois and California, Eisenhower, in his post-trip report wrote:

The dirt roads of Iowa are well graded and are good in dry weather; but would be impossible in wet weather. In Nebraska, the first real sand was encountered, and two days were lost in western part of this state due to bad, sandy roads. Wyoming roads west of Cheyenne are poor dirt ones, with weak culverts and bridges. In one day, 14 of these were counted, broken through by the train. The desert roads in the southwest portion of this state are very poor. In western Utah, on the Salt Lake Desert, the road becomes almost impossible to heavy vehicles. From Orr’s Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits and holes. This stretch was not improved in any way, and consisted only of a track across the desert. At many points on the road water is twenty miles distant, and parts of the road are ninety miles from the nearest railroad. (EISENHOWER REPORT)

In fact, one of the biggest problems was the poor state of the bridges along the Lincoln Highway. PHOTO: Army Truck testing the holding power of one of many small bridges crossed during the Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy, 1919. Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 81-17-25.

Advance notice of the convoy spread and its arrival in towns along the Lincoln Highway were occasions for celebrations and plenty of speeches imploring listeners to demand more public funding for “Good Roads.” The convoy passed through 350 communities, and it was estimated that more than 3,000,000 people witnessed it along the route. Millions more followed the trek in newspapers and early motion picture “newsreels.” PHOTO: 1919 Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy on Review, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1919. Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 81-17-55.

The convoy did make it. Battered, but unbowed, the caravan arrived at the gates of Lincoln Park in San Francisco. However, it had taken until September 6, 1919 for it to reach its destination, a grueling sixty-two (62) days!

In November 1919, Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower wrote a seven-page report relaying the observations he made during the Army Convoy to the Chief of the Army’s Motor Transport Corps (M.T.C.). He summarized the results as follows:

The truck train was well received at all points along the route. It seemed that there was a great deal of sentiment for the improving of highways, and, from the standpoint of promoting this sentiment, the trip was an undoubted success. As stated before in this paper, it is believed that the M. T. C. should pay more attention to disciplinary drills for officers and men, and that all should be intelligent, snappy soldiers before giving them the responsibility of operating trucks. Extended trips by trucks through the middle western part of the United States are impracticable until roads are improved, and then only a light truck should be used on long hauls. Through the eastern part of the United States, the truck can be efficiently used in the Military Service, especially in problems involving a haul of approximately 100 miles, which could be negotiated by light trucks in one day. (EISENHOWER REPORT.)

THE 1919 ARMY MOTOR CONVOY IN ILLINOIS

The 1919 Army Transcontinental Army Convoy crossed into Illinois on the afternoon of Saturday, July 19, 1919. It stopped the next day for a Sunday rest period in Chicago Heights. The trip was resumed on Monday July 21, 1919, and the convoy camped over that night in DeKalb. On Tuesday July 22, 1919, the convoy left DeKalb and crossed over the Mississippi River Bridge at Fulton, Illinois and entered into Iowa that evening.

During the two full days it spent on the road in Illinois, the convoy covered about 172 miles in a little over 21 hours on the road. It was fairly lucky with the weather and thus the roads, but as the following account from the convoy’s daily log reveals, it had its share of problems with the vehicles, drivers, and equipment in its journey across the Land of Lincoln.

So basically from the 1950s right up until around 2008 when the Sub-Prime Mortgage Bubble popped, as the Industrial Jobs began to leave the country in the 1970s to go to Cheaper Labor Markets in places like Mexico, India and China, fairly decently paid work in the Construction Industry took their place. Many jobs even for highly paid well educated folks like Civil Engineers, Architects, Electrical Engineers, Plumbers et al, as every new Mall and every new Suburban Subdivision needed to be Wired Up and Plumbed to keep the Sanitation Decent. As the communities sprouted like mushrooms across the once Pristine Wilderness of the FSoA, Civil Service Goobermint workers in every field from Police Work to Sanitation workers to Teachers were necessary. Where did the MONEY come from to PAY all these people for these new JOBS in these new communities?

As with ALL money since the beginning of the Industrial Era (and really long before that, btu expanding exponentially through this period), the MONEY came from the Issuance of New Credit done by the folks who have controlled this since the beginning of the Colonial Era at the LATEST, the TBTF Banks and the small number of people who control them, often referred to here on the pages of the Diner as the “Illuminati”. In 1692 the Bank of England was Chartered, and despite a real lack of Precious Metals in England at that time, these folks issued CREDIT on what basically was all the resources of the New World they were set to exploit. They did not HAVE the “money” to issue out, they CREATED the money to issue out. Long as everyone under their Political Control HAD to use this money (“Legal Tender”) they could LOAN it to others, who then owed them Interest. Anyone on the Inside of this Scheme never really could go Broke, as they could always issue themselves newer and bigger Loans to further buy out the Resources, and the Flow Begins of this money through the economy. EVERYTGHING comes to depend on this flow of money, and constant INCREASE in the money supply otherwise the interest being charged cannot be paid up on. whenever a Contraction or even just a slowdown occurs, Depressions ensue, Deleveraging occurs and most of the population gets hung out to dry. this was the narrative pretty much from 1700 right through to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Throughout the period of the post-Revolutionary War here in the FSoA, Credit was issued by Industrialists in Europe to first off exploit the Coal Resources here and ship them back to Europe to power their Factories, and then to further build out Industrial Infrastructure here. The Railroads were the essential component of this, because without them there was no moving the Coal from the mines of West Virginia to the Ports on the East Coast. So the Jobs of those days came in the form of Coal Mining and Railroad construction, and as the railroads expanded across the continent, new communities based on this new type of Industrial living popped up like Buboes across the landscape.

Still, it was basically an Agrarian Paradigm, with most people in the country engaged in local Agriculture, right up until the Great Depression. Reason for this is that it really was not until the 1920’s or so that the first ICE Tractors became available, and Ag was still very Human Labor intensive through the 1800s. Even going into the Great Depression in the 1930s, most estimates I have read put 90% of the population here living and working locally in the Ag paradigm.

For those who did not Own Land, up until the Civil War you had explicit Slavery for the imported African Labor force, so I don’t think you can really call what they did as a “Job”. During the Reconstruction period, you had Sharecroppers, and not sure this form of exploiting labor can be called a Job either.

Where what we think of now as Jobs being paid with Money emerged here was first in the Coal Mines and along the Railroad Tracks, work which was uniformly low paid and very dangerous also. Workers who performed these jobs were recruited from places like China and Ireland, where conditions for their populations were so bad at the time that just the CHANCE to come over here and work in one of these jobs was a step up, though for many it proved a disappointment for sure as they died in dangerous working conditions, and often had wages so low surviving on what you could buy from the Company Store was pretty difficult

The upshot of this period as the Factories began to pop up as well was a workforce that became increasingly Organized, with Labor making it’s first Battles here against the Capitalist class in control of Credit Creation, money, and by this time virtually all the worthwhile Property across the country.

In fact this battle started in Europe where the whole Industrial paradigm began, and Jobs (or lack of them) and ridiculously low pay and bad working conditions developed alternative ideas to the Capital Exploitation model. Specifically, Karl Marx and Friederich Engels developed the Communist model, which the Bolsheviks in Russia tried to implement, becoming increasingly bastardized over time. In fact that model was probably corrupt right from the get go, as Trotsky and Lenin likely got most of their funding for that Revolution from Industrialists in Germany and England.

Over here, as the Great Depression took hold, similar Movements towards Communism and Socialism began to gain traction, the Wobblies were a growing force, and everything possible was done to keep that movement from gaining traction. Labor Union was pitted against Labor Union, Union Bosses were paid off, the Pinkertons were brought in to disrupt Organization and physically threaten anyone organizing, and overall the Capitalist class was successful in destroying the Labor Movement in the FSoA as we moved into and past the Great Depression.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international industrial union that was formed in 1905. The origin of the nickname “Wobblies” is uncertain.[3]

In the 1910s and early ’20s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American west, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries. At their peak in 1923, IWW membership has been estimated at about 40,000.[8] However, the extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated at 133% per decade) makes it difficult to state membership totals with any certainty, as workers tended to join the IWW in large numbers for relatively short periods (e.g., during labor strikes and periods of generalized economic distress).[9]

Nonetheless, membership declined dramatically in the 1920s due to several factors. There were conflicts with other labor groups, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which regarded the IWW as too radical while the IWW regarded the AFL as too staid and conservative.[8] Membership also declined in the wake of government crackdowns on radical, anarchist and socialist groups during the First Red Scare after WWI. The most decisive factor in the decline in IWW membership and influence, however, was a 1924 schism due to internal conflict, from which the IWW never fully recovered.[8][10]

Compromises were made however, and the New Deal of Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt incorporated numerous salves to buy off the Working Class, primary among them the creation of the Social Security system. Unions also still retained decent power in the post WWII period as the Automotive Industry ramped up in the FSoA, and for a short while the Working Class Heros of Industrialization did OK here, from say 1950 to maybe 1970 or so, though you did have to usually have “Connections” to get inside any of the powerful Trade Unions of the Era.

Over time of course the Unions and their ability to negotiate a better wage for their workers has been systematically diminished, and on a Media level the whole IDEA of Unions and Collective bargaining has been subject to non-stop Bernays style propagandizing against, to the point through the 90s-00s that even the Blue Collar workers such collectives work best for were convinced they were bad. Go to any Kneejerk Conservatard Website like the one Mike “Mish” Shedlock runs on Global Economic Analysis, and you will find non-stop BLAME being placed on Unions as the Cause of all our problems. See folks, if we just got rid of those nasty Teacher’s Unions and Auto Unions and all those “Big” Pensions they negotiated over the years, we would have PROSPERITY again! LOL.

Prosperity for WHO? Certainly not Prosperity for the Pensioners who have their pensions ripped out from under them, that is for sure. Certainly not Prosperity for the next Generation of Workers either, who in order to keep our products “competitive” on the Global Market need to drop their Wages down to whatever it is the Chinese of Mexicans or Egyptians are getting these days, like $2/day there. the folks who PROSPER from reneging on Pensions are the Rentier Class, aka the Illuminati. See, they are the “Secured Bondholders”. gotta pay them off before you pay the pension of anyone who worked for the City of Detroit for the last 30 years. As the economic system which Industrialists used to build out their system falls apart here, they hang out to dry everyone who ever worked in the system in ANY capacity, from an Industrial Factory Worker to a Coal Miner to the Police Force of Detroit, who for near 100 years protected the “Property” these folks claimed to own, thoroughly polluted and then abandoned.

Same Bizness occurring over in China now, just at a vastly Accelerated Pace as first the Hot Money drops in there to “Create Jobs” in Industry, profit is sucked out on the back of cheap labor, the resource landscape of the country is destroyed and then when no more Profit can be pulled from this mess, they “Unwind the Carry Trade”, Newzpeak for the Rentier Class packing their bags and Private Jets with whatever they can and GTFO of Dodge, leaving the rest of the Chinese Population to die in the stinking sewer they made of that land mass.

Today, as we speak, this whole paradigm is coming to a close, for numerous reasons.

First off, there really is no NEW place to go to either exploit Resources or Exploit Labor to gain “Profit” for the individual or corporation that has not already been thoroughly sucked dry. Though there is still some fossil fuel energy left in the ground to extract, the energy cost for pulling it up comes ever closer each day to the cost the consumer of this energy can afford to pay. Without continuing expansion of Credit, there is no ‘money” flow to the end consumer, and while the Central Banks provide endless Quantitative Easing FREE CREDIT a ZIRP to their member TBTF Banks, said Banks do not pass this money on in the form of new loans to anybody further than one tier below their line. Do you think a lot of Individuals line up to buy a Facepalm IPO? Who are the “Investors” in Facepalm, and where do they get the money to invest in that piece of shit Social Media White Elephant? Faceplam has NEVER turned a Profit since the day Mark Suckerbug and the Winkletwins dreamed it up. Regardless, “investors” subscribed to the IPO to the tune of like $100B, least that is around where the Market Cap is here I think. Where did they GET $100B to “invest” in Facepalm? They BORROWED it from the Federal Reserve, rehypothecating worthless MBS as collateral to invest here. This is the circle jerk of money creation, and folks on the inside get fabulously wealthy off of it, but everybody else gets screwed to beat the band here. Constant investment in ultimately non-productive and worthless enterprise that simply burns energy faster all the time, until there is nothing left to burn, which we are not at yet but getting closer to all the time. Ongoing here really since the very first Railroad Tracks were laid here in the FSoA in the early 1800s.

So, in the final analysis, this is where all the “JOBS” came from. Money created as Debt to exploit the resources of the New World, accessing a fabulous wealth of stored energy, first from Coal, then following that from Oil. Every last “Job” that has been created through the era all comes from the downhill flow of this energy as it is burned, and with less and less available to burn all the time, there are fewere and fewer Jobs to be had that depend on the burning of this energy. Politicos calls for a “Return to Growth” are a chimera, there is no growth, really there has not been for 30 years here or so. The “growth” you see is Numerical Smoke & Mirrors, pretty arbitrary numbers overall that get bigger all the time, while the population at large gets poorer all the time. The FSoA population has been getting steadily poorer under this paradigm, but not until now has it really been evident, masked well by Financialism and control over the Global Reserve Currency of the Dollar.

Besides the fact there is no new place to GO to exploit resource and labor, the result of 200 years of this shit is that we are now Neck Deep in our own sewage, with far too many people on the planet who have opportunity for truly productive things to do with their lives and who are pretty much 100% Dependent on the system continuing onward for their own survival. Willfully trying to exit the system while it continues to function is close to impossible in most places, really you have to go way out into the bush to even try something like this, and few people are prepared to do that these days.

Those of us who are engaged in building the SUN Project see all of these things quite clearly. There are no easy answers, no simple ways to exit, and a “Crash on Demand” by a large percentage of the population walking away from Industrialization simultaneously is unlikely to occur as a willfull thing, though it may happen organically quite rapidly if the current systems fail rapidly in cascade fashion.

For those of us involved in SUN, we seek to redefine the ideas of Jobs, Work & Money. Jobs as we have known them through the Industrial Era are already going the way of the Dinosaur, and as Bruce Springstein write in “My Hometown”, they ain’t ever coming back.

We don’t NEED no Stinkin’ JOBs, and we don’t NEED the Debt Money pitched out here by the Illuminati for the last 200 years of Industrialization either. Like the “Assets” this money created, it is all going quite Worthless now. What we NEED is to work together, to build our communities, to work for the common good of our Species and the Planet we live on. We are rapidly running short on time here to make such changes in anything but the most Painful Way conceivable, and Heliopaths seek to avoid such a nasty endgame, if not for everyone, at least for those who see what is coming and wish to do the best they can to avoid it with us.

Perhaps you think this is all useless, it is too late already and the End is Written in Stone. If so, I wish you well and I will see you in the Great Beyond when we all get there. I personally am not concerned with whether the End is Written in Stone or not, because that does not materially affect the way I approach this End Game. Maybe I will go down, maybe my friends will go down too. However, if that is how it plays out, we will GO DOWN SWINGING.

As the Collapse marches its way around the world and both Sovereigns and Banks are “discovered” to be completely Insolvent and BROKE, the BIGGEST of Newzpeak inventions is the idea of “Recapitalization”. This sounds Technical and Capitalist enough that most J6Ps buy it without a PEEP, even when their own Deposit Money is stolen for the purpose of “Recapitalizing” a Bank which has just gone BK and lost everybody’s money!

If I go BK, does anybody Recapitalize ME? WTF do people accept the idea FAILING Banks who JUST lost EVERYBODY’s Money should be “Recapitalized”, with the SAME jackasses running the show who just lost everything?

What a fucking RACKET! Anytime you Go Broke in the Casino, you just “Recapitalize” and go out gambling AGAIN! You just gotta be close enough to the Nodes of Power at the Top of this Game to ALWAYS get “Recapitalized”, even when the whole SYSTEM goes Kaput!

Then there is the Nonsense of Splitting Failed Banks into a “Good Bank” with performing Assets and a “Bad Bank” with all the garbage. Who will Buy Stock in the “Bad Bank”? The Bad Bank is just a Newzpeak Euphimism for TAXPAYER LIABILITY. Da Goobermint gets the Bad Bank, the Illuminati get the Good Bank! There’s a Fair Deal for you! Privatize the Profits, Socialize the Losses in a NUTSHELL!

Next is the Dumbass idea of “Nationalizing” Failing Banks. WTF do I want to Nationalize a LOSER company? Put the whole NATION on the Hook for the bad debt of said Bank, that’s a GREAT IDEA! Why not just let the LOSER Bank go to the Great Beyond and start a NEW Bank on a National Level?

Why NOT is because of course everyone bought into the system, and if you let those Bad Banks go Belly Up, lotsa folks won’t get their Pension Checks. Hell, they won’t even get back their Savings or Checking Account Money nowadays!

Money is a SYSTEM people become dependent on, just like say having a Smart Phone. When I was a kid, you had a Phone at your house, that is how people could talk to you from far away, but you did have to be HOME to receive the call. “Answering Machines”, the precursor of Voicemail didn’t exist at the time. Those Cassette Driven Recorders didn’t emerge until I was well into my teens. Nowadays though, you simply can’t EXIST and be a part of the Techno-Economy without a Smart Phone, to not only keep you Hooked in to communication with your Workplace (why didn’t you pick up? we NEEDED you to come in and fix the Server Crash!), but of course also to Tweet to all the WORLD your latest 1 sentence declaration on Monetary Collapse! Even fucking Bill Gross of PIMPCO Tweets idiocy!

Somehow though,before Voicemail, before Answering Machines, before even the Fucking TELEPHONE was invented, society managed to function OK, to one extent or another. In my parents time when they were kids, though the Telephone had been invented, almost nobody even had a phone in their domicile. How did they “Call in Sick” to work in those days? Answer, they didn’t of course. Workplace made do, so-and-so isn’t here today. If SaS does this too often, he gets fired. Now though, you gotta answer the phone, concoct a REASON (my dog is having a mid-life crisis!) and show up next day with a note & diagnosis from the Canine Social Worker to explain yourself and your Dog’s emotional angst. LOL.

Dependent most of us are in the Industrial Economy on our Automobiles, and Cheap Fuel to push them down the Road to get us to Walmart to buy Everything at Low, Low Prices Every Day and to get to the Workplace or to get the Kids to Skule…etc. That is a tough dependency to BREAK, but NOTHING compared to breaking the dependency on the Monetary System. Removing yourself from this inside Industrialized Nations is for all intents & purposes quite impossible for most people, there isn’t any real Wilderness left to escape to and do Jeremiah Johnson. OK, up here in Alaska you can still sorta do it if you stay on the move all the time, but soon as you drop down a Cabin anywhere the Rangers will drop in on you. You certainly can’t start a COMMUNITY out in the Bush without Goobermint dropping in to regulate your lives. A LAW up here is if you have kids, your Domicile has to have Hot Water and Toilets. You can’t keep your kids if you live in TeePees and use the Great Outdoors as a Toilet like every other mammal does. Child Protective Services will drop in and take the kids and drop them into the Foster Care system. Which is a pretty good Racket also if you DO live in a McMansion with Hot Water, you get around $700/mo from the state for every kid you take in this way. The state does NOT however pay the Original/Biological Parents 700 Bananas/mo to maintain the kid. How fucking STUPID is this system?

The coming REALITY of course is that the State is FRESH OUT of Bananas. Amongst the FIRST Casualties of Banana Shortage will be the Pension Funds of J6P, first the Corporate Ones from BK companies, then the Municipal and State ones, finally the large Goobermint ones like Social Security. All these funds are already being raided to keep the failing banking system propped up with creative accounting tricks.

Sadly of course, JUST raiding Pension Funds isn’t sufficient to prop up a system which in Euotrashland is leveraged probably 100:1, and here is probably 50:1, though nobody KNOWS really because so much of the leveraging is in the Shadow Banking System of Derivatives. No, now they ALSO gotta “Haircut” the Depositors, who don’t REALLY own their Money as soon as they Deposit it in a Bank. Once deposited, the Bank is free to Legally Gamble it however they like, Pledge it as Collateral 10 times over in Rehypothections schemes, and it just ONE of those bets goes South and they get a Margin Call, you can say Bye-Bye to your Money.

So, due to insufficient Pension Funds and Deposits to STEAL here to make good on all the various BAD BETS of Filthy Rich Pigmen Banksters, after everything is STOLEN, what is asked for NEXT? RECAPITALIZATION!

Let me explain this concept to you in PLAIN ENGLISH. Somebody else can translate it into Kraut for our Kraut readers. The Chinese Readers are SOL since we have no Han Diners I am aware of at the moment, and the Chinese are TOAST anyhow. LOL.

The folks who Own the World run this system of Ownership through the TBTF Banks they Own. If the Bank goes Belly Up, they lose everything, money and Ownership, it all gets thrown into a big Bankruptcy Pool to be divied up and sold off to whoever still has some money, which really is about nobody.

What “recapitalizing” a Bank really is takes theoretical Future Tax Revenue from the Taxpayer and GIVES it to the Uber Rich, the VERY SAME PEOPLE who just LOST EVERYTHING to begin with! As I said at the beginning of this Rant, WHAT A RACKET! You can’t EVER go Broke, every time you lose your bets in a big CRASH of the monetary system you are running, you get J6P to “recapitalize” you because you so expertly handled his life savings last time.

In reality however, “Capital” is not Debt nor is it the Fiat Money representing that Debt nor is it even Piles of Gold stored in Basement Safes of Sovereigns, Illuminati or Small Time Zero Hedge Piglets either. Capital is the Resources of the Earth, Energy stores in particular in the form of Fossil Fuels through the Industrial Era. Through the process of the War Machine and the Legal System regulating Property Ownership, a small Cabal of People gained control over most of the important Resources of the Earth, Land to begin with, Energy stores in the form of Coal & Oil through the Industrial Era. Here in the FSoA, around the time Da Fed was chartered in 1913, this Cabal was probably around 150 Industrialists and Banksters, probably somewhat larger now though the ones who got in earliest on the Ponzi remain the most powerful ones here. In the FSoA,you can identify the Rockefellers, Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans et al, the “Robber Barrons” of the 1800s as the main players. Part of a still larger Ponzi which goes back to the Collapse of the Roman Empire, same general Monetary System has been perpetuated throughout the millenia, though it took a Big Hit during the Dark Ages. Did not disappear though, it was mainly perpetuated under the auspices of the Holy Roman Catholic Church through the Dark Ages. This crowd mainly identified by the Rothschilds, Kuhns and Warburgs on the Banking end, and the Plantaganets, Hapsburghs et al on the Political End in Eurotrashland.

Why is it every time there is a Massive Monetary Crash (and this is not the first one by any means, they occur regularly every 80 years or so), the SAME people get “Recapitalized” by J6P to remain in what appears to be Perpetual Control over the Resources of the Earth, and the Political Systems which Goobern the life of J6P? The reason was probably best stated by Henry Ford, who went BK around 5 times on his way to becoming one of the world’s most “Wealthy” men:

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

You see, probably 99% of people have ZERO understanding of how the Monetary Sytem works at ALL. They simply TRUST in it, and they don’t have smarts enough to separate and devise their own. In fact you DO have to be VERY SMART and CRAFTY to set up a Monetary system which will last any length of time at all, and even then you have to have Political Control over vast resources of the Earth to do it. Such has been the case for most of History, going right back as far as the Tower of Babel. Those IN CONTROL recruit and sift out people who can run such a system, Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi are examples of that. “The Smartest Guys in the Room”. J6P can’t field anyone who holds a Candle to these guys, they ARE really smart, even if they are working from some really flawed basic principals.

So when a given iteration of the Monetary System fails, you get a buncha Wars as was the case in Eurotrashland from the collapse of the Roman Empire circa say 350AD or so, or WORLD WARS as was the case around 1900 to Present Day. WWII never ended, its just been pursued at a somewhat lower level regionally since Armistice was signed between the major powers of the Industrial Era.

Why do we get stuck with a NEW iteration of the same Bad Old System every time so far? Because when the Monetary System collapses, the SAME people are in control of the Military Apparatus. J6P has no control over that, he just ends up as Cannon Fodder fighting the battles as new alighnments and geopolitical and economic structures are refabricated. This leads MANY people to believe this will be the case in perpetuity, it is a Popular Meme amongst many Diners even. I have Ranted at length on numerous occassions why this is not so, but I STILL don’t have too many BELIEVERS on this subject. It’s hard to get people to understand Money to begin with, still harder to explain a Paradigm Shift of this nature.

You see, all reconstructions of this type of Monetary System depend on a SURPLUS of Capital,aka NATURAL RESOURCES. Mathematically speaking, you simply cannot reconstruct such a system in the absence of such resource, THAT is the Capital! It’s not the money, it’s not even the Gold. It is what those things REPRESENT, and when it is GONE, both represent nothing at all.

Are resources COMPLETELY gone? Of course they are not, but relative to current population size, they are in serious DEFICIT. You cannot get any REAL GROWTH out of this, no way no how, so you cannot pay any Interest. Thus you get ZIRP. Under ZIRP, Pensions, Equity Investment, everything FAILS. ZIRP is a KLUDGE to keep the system rolling another day, but it fails to bring return on investement, regardless of money printing to prop up markets. That is mainly just a redistribution of wealth mechanism, taking money from the Poor to Prop up investments of the Rich. All going south though, just the poor get hit first here this way.

The structure is bound to implode mathematically speaking, it doesn’t have basic energy support to keep it running. It CANNOT be rebooted in the absence of copious energy, or a massive population die off of Homo Sapiens. The latter is a likely outcome, but such a massive die off would deconstuct Global Power Structure, so you still don’t arrive at equilibrium this way. You’ll just get a lot of flux in the system as it re-equilibrates. I don’t think too many of the Pundits understand the equilibation dynamics, I am quite sure John Michael Greer doesn’t, nor Jimmy Kuntser. Dmitry Orlov to an extent. Steve from Virginia sorta gets it, but he traps himself in the 1700 Paradigm most of the time.

Anyhow, Recapitalization of Banks is COMPLETE garbage, and needs to be Politically Repudiated, which it will be. Unfortunate OUTCOME of that is most of the systems we take for granted will collapse, and and EXTRAORDINARY number of people will DIE. So it goes. You can’t make an Omellette without Breaking a Few Eggs.

Why is the global economy in so much trouble? How can so many people be so absolutely certain that the world financial system is going to crash? Well, the truth is that when you take a look at the cold, hard numbers it is not difficult to see why the global financial pyramid scheme is destined to fail. In the United States today, there is approximately 56 trillion dollars of total debt in our financial system, but there is only about 9 trillion dollars in our bank accounts. So you could take every single penny out of the banks, multiply it by six, and you still would not have enough money to pay off all of our debts. Overall, there is about 190 trillion dollars of total debt on the planet. But global GDP is only about 70 trillion dollars. And the total notional value of all derivatives around the globe is somewhere between 600 trillion and 1500 trillion dollars. So we have a gigantic problem on our hands. The global financial system is a very shaky house of cards that has been constructed on a foundation of debt, leverage and incredibly risky derivatives. We are living in the greatest financial bubble in world history, and it isn’t going to take much to topple the entire thing. And when it falls, it is going to be the largest financial disaster in the history of the planet.

The global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and a crisis at one major bank or in one area of the world can spread at lightning speed. As I wrote about yesterday, the entire European banking system is leveraged 26 to 1 at this point. A decline in asset values of just 4 percent would totally wipe out the equity of many of those banks, and once a financial panic begins we could potentially see major financial institutions start to go down like dominoes.

We got a small taste of what that is like back in 2008, and it is inevitable that it will happen again.

Anyone that would tell you that the current global financial system is sustainable does not know what they are talking about. Just look at the numbers that I have posted below.

The following is the global financial pyramid scheme by the numbers…

–$9,283,000,000,000 – The total amount of all bank deposits in the United States. The FDIC has just 25 billion dollars in the deposit insurance fund that is supposed to “guarantee” those deposits. In other words, the ratio of total bank deposits to insurance fund money is more than 371 to 1.

–$10,012,800,000,000 – The total amount of mortgage debt in the United States. As you can see, you could take every penny out of every bank account in America and it still would not cover it.

–$10,409,500,000,000 – The M2 money supply in the United States. This is probably the most commonly used measure of the total amount of money in the U.S. economy.

–$15,094,000,000,000 – U.S. GDP. It is a measure of all economic activity in the United States for a single year.

–$16,749,269,587,407.53 – The size of the U.S. national debt. It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.

–$32,000,000,000,000 – The total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).

–$190,000,000,000,000 – The approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world. It has nearly doubled in size over the past decade.

–$212,525,587,000,000 – According to the U.S. government, this is the notional value of the derivatives that are being held by the top 25 banks in the United States. But those banks only have total assets of about 8.9 trillion dollars combined. In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 24 to 1.

–$600,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 – The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives generally fall within this range. At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives to global GDP is more than 21 to 1.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Every single day, the total amount of debt will continue to grow faster than the total amount of money until the day that this bubble bursts.

What we witnessed back in 2008 was just a little “hiccup” in the system. It caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but global financial authorities were able to get things stabilized.

Next time it won’t be so easy.

The next wave of the economic collapse is quickly approaching. A full-blown economic depression has already started in southern Europe. Unemployment is at record highs and economic activity is contracting rapidly.

The major offshore banking centers in Cyprus are on the verge of collapsing. It was just announced that they will now be closed until Tuesday, but nobody really knows for sure when they will be allowed to reopen. And there is already talk that when they do reopen that there will be strict limits on how much money people can take out.

And now the IMF is warning that the three biggest banks in Slovenia are failing and that a billion euros will be needed to bail them out.

The dominoes are starting to tumble, and the United States won’t be immune. In fact, the greatest financial problems that the United States has ever seen are on the horizon.

But you can just have faith that Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress know exactly what they are doing and will be able to save us from the coming financial collapse if you want.

The mainstream media will provide you with all of the positive economic news that you could possibly want. They are giddy about the fact that the Dow keeps hitting all-time highs and they would have us all believe that we are in the midst of a robust economic recovery. You can listen to them if you want to.

But when you are tempted to believe that everything is going to be “okay” somehow, just go back and look at the numbers there were posted above one more time.

There is no way that the global financial pyramid scheme is going to be able to hold up for too much longer. At some point it is going to totally collapse. When that happens, will you be ready?

Does a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world? Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes? The answer might surprise you. Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control. And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings. When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars. As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year andstill be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt. That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible. Under this ne0-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments. Just look around – everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier. But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth. They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations. The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet. They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system. They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. It is just that most people don’t want to admit the truth.

The ultra-wealthy don’t run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won’t be taxed such as the Cayman Islands. According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.

U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn’t hit 32 trillion dollars.

And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc.

The global elite have really hoarded an incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times. The following is from an article on the Huffington Post website…

Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts – excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses – puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.

The research was carried out for pressure group Tax Justice Network, which campaigns against tax havens, by James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co.

He used data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations and central banks.

But as I mentioned previously, the global elite just don’t have a lot of money. They also basically own just about every major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet.

According to an outstanding NewScientist article, a study of more than 40,000 transnational corporations conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich discovered that a very small core group of huge banks and giant predator corporations dominate the entire global economic system…

The researchers found that this core group consists of just 147 very tightly knit companies…

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

The following are the top 25 banks and corporations at the heart of this “super-entity”. You will recognize many of the names on the list…

The ultra-wealthy elite often hide behind layers and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune 500 corporation.

The amount of power and control that this gives them is hard to describe.

Unfortunately, this same group of people have been running things for a very long time. For example, New York City Mayor John F. Hylan said the following during a speech all the way back in 1922…

The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.

They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.

These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.

These international bankers created the central banks of the world (including the Federal Reserve), and they use those central banks to get the governments of the world ensnared in endless cycles of debt from which there is no escape. Government debt is a way to “legitimately” take money from all of us, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.

Today, Barack Obama and almost all members of Congress absolutely refuse to criticize the Fed, but in the past there have been some brave members of Congress that have been willing to take a stand. For example, the following quote is from a speech that Congressman Louis T. McFadden delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 10, 1932…

Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board has cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.

Sadly, most Americans still believe that the Federal Reserve is a “federal agency”, but that is simply not correct. The following comes from factcheck.org…

The stockholders in the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are the privately owned banks that fall under the Federal Reserve System. These include all national banks (chartered by the federal government) and those state-chartered banks that wish to join and meet certain requirements. About 38 percent of the nation’s more than 8,000 banks are members of the system, and thus own the Fed banks.

According to researchers that have looked into the ownership of the big Wall Street banks that dominate the Fed, the same names keep coming up over and over: the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Lazards, the Schiffs and the royal families of Europe.

But ultra-wealthy international bankers have not just done this kind of thing in the United States. Their goal was to create a global financial system that they would dominate and control. Just check out what Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley once wrote…

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.

Sadly, most Americans have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is at the very heart of the global financial system. The following is from Wikipedia…

As an organization of central banks, the BIS seeks to make monetary policy more predictable and transparent among its 58 member central banks. While monetary policy is determined by each sovereign nation, it is subject to central and private banking scrutiny and potentially to speculation that affects foreign exchange rates and especially the fate of export economies. Failures to keep monetary policy in line with reality and make monetary reforms in time, preferably as a simultaneous policy among all 58 member banks and also involving the International Monetary Fund, have historically led to losses in the billions as banks try to maintain a policy using open market methods that have proven to be based on unrealistic assumptions.

The ultra-wealthy have also played a major role in establishing other important international institutions such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. In fact, the land for the United Nations headquarters in New York City was purchased and donated by John D. Rockefeller.

The international bankers are “internationalists” and they are very proud of that fact.

The elite also dominate the education system in the United States. Over the years, the Rockefeller Foundation and other elitist organizations have poured massive amounts of money into Ivy League schools. Today, Ivy League schools are considered to be the standard against which all other colleges and universities in America are measured, and the last four U.S. presidents were educated at Ivy League schools.

The elite also exert a tremendous amount of influence through various secret societies (Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, etc.), through some very powerful think tanks and social clubs (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, Chatham House, etc.), and through a vast network of charities and non-governmental organizations (the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, etc.).

But for a moment, I want to focus on the power the elite have over the media. In a previous article, I detailed how just six monolithic corporate giants control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. These giant corporations own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites.

Considering the fact that the average American watches 153 hours of television a month, the influence of these six giant corporations should not be underestimated. The following are just some of the media companies that these corporate giants own…

And of course the elite own most of our politicians as well. The following is a quote from journalist Lewis Lapham…

“The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas.”

Have you ever wondered why things never seem to change in Washington D.C. no matter who we vote for?

Well, it is because both parties are owned by the establishment.

It would be nice to think that the American people are in control of who runs things in the U.S., but that is not how it works in the real world.

Our politicians are not stupid – they are going to be very good to the people that can give them the giant piles of money that they need for their campaigns. And the people that can do that are the ultra-wealthy and the giant corporations that the ultra-wealthy control.

Are you starting to get the picture?

There is a reason why the ultra-wealthy are referred to as “the establishment”. They have set up a system that greatly benefits them and that allows them to pull the strings.

“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

There is so much more that could be said about all of this. In fact, an entire library of books could be written about the power and the influence of the ultra-wealthy international bankers that run the world.

But hopefully this is enough to at least get some conversations started.

So what do you think about all of this? Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

Before the 9/11 truth movement existed I knew what we were being told was bull shit. I knew that because I was on the vessel that dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan as a result of 9/11. I knew in my bones that the American population, and the world, was being lied to, but I didn’t know the specifics. I wanted out of the navy before 9/11 happened. I had realized that enlisting in the military was a grave mistake for me because I valued self exploration, autonomy, and intellect; none of which the navy provided, gave a shit about, or allowed to occur. I choked down the contracts I had signed until 9/11happened. It was one thing to be slaving away as a nuclear automaton relatively benignly as far as the world was concerned, but it was quite another to be assisting in the killing of invisible innocents. I wanted to know the truth badly.

After about a year of alcohol and drug use, I started to actively pursue the truth (in those rare moments of temporary sobriety). This search led me to Alex Jones and his infowars. It didn’t take long before I became a card totin’ prisonplanet member. I listened to his broadcasts and watched all of his documentary films. For a couple of years I was an Alex Jones disciple. He verified my anger and my actions concerning the navy. I knew that I was right to do what I had done, but I didn’t have the proof until Alex Jones. When patrons came to my bar they got an ear full. I ran a lot of people off, but I opened a lot of eyes as well.

I was all about exposing the Illuminati for their NWO conspiracy to imprison the planet as an intellectual thing until I viewed “The Passion of the Christ.” Shortly after viewing that film I had a dream where I met evil incarnate in the form of an old female demon that looked a lot like Zelda from “Pet Cemetary” only scarier. It was a vivid dream that felt more like reality than my waking life. It scarred the shit out of me and caused me to run back to the eager arms of Christianity, the religion of my child hood. Yes, for about six months I could be seen sitting behind my bar during the slow times reading a pocket sized copy of the New Testament. Then I started reading the likes of Tex Marrs, whom if you don’t know, is a Christian evangelical conspiracy theory nut job. He takes the Illuminati seriously on a spiritual level and applies it all to Revelations and the end times. Now, I was a Christian conspiracy theorists, which is the original type of conspiracy theorists. In fact, the Illuminati really is a Christian conspiracy theory and doesn’t make much sense out of that context. This is Satan operating amongst man. I even got into reading the “Left Behind” series at this point in my life (I don’t mind if you laugh at my expense…I would). Then one day, and I don’t remember the day or the moment, because I don’t think there was one, I just stopped with the Christian nonsense. Basically the fear from meeting Zelda wore off and I came to my senses. All that meant was that I dropped the spiritual implications from what the Illuminati was. Now it was framed in a more secular content, but otherwise I was still ate up with it.

I met my wife in October of 2002, 10 months after flipping the penny that brought me back to the South. I was drunk, as usual, and I walked into one of the several bars I frequented looking for companionship. I was by myself this particular night. I noticed an ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine playing pool with a smokin’ hot vixen (pictured above). I always liked Summer (the ex of the friend), and knowing her gave me the courage to start talkin’ shit to that vixen. I was so broke at the time that Joey and I’s fifth apartment didn’t even have the power turned on yet (we had been living there for about two weeks). Our first date was financed on a roll of quarters belonging to Wendy. We went to a hole in the wall pool hall where they have .25 cent games and you can’t see cause all of the smoke and bad country music, and then we went to the Waffle House where we drank coffee and she ate hash browns. I told her that I had lost count at 23 women, had done just about every drug under the sun, and usually scared women away because I was too “deep.” I still have that paper coin roll in my wallet.

Six months later Wendy and I were living together. Three months after that Wendy was gone and I was left with a Goodwill couch, an entertainment stand with nothing on it, and a computer. She had vanished due to a torrid affair that I had gotten myself wrapped up in presumably for being too “deep”. I had fallen in love with a bar patron of mine who reciprocated those feelings. It is a long story, and one that I’ll spare you the details of. However, for whatever reason, Wendy did not want to give up on me, and so a few months into the new relationship I was cheating on her with Wendy. It was a mess. When it was all over, Wendy and I were back together, and she was living 70 miles away. I had a drivers license and a broke down car that didn’t work at this point. Wendy did a lot of driving on account of my sorry ass, and I still don’t know why.

When we were engaged was when I got hauled off to the slammer for being a stupid drunk. I continued going to my job managing a shit hole bar via my bike. Luckily for me, the cop who had pulled me over had resigned from Spartanburg PD and moved to Charleston. Case closed. I got back my license and didn’t get charged with a DUI (which would have sealed my fate as a loser cause I never would have worked in EMS otherwise). However I did lose 2500 dollars to a lawyer who required 5000 to represent me. He let me off the hook with just the 2500 dollar retainer on account of his punk ass didn’t have to do a damn thing for the money.

At this point, engaged, and not a damn thing going for me short of tending bars, I decided I better do something a little more in line with a domesticated lifestyle. This was when I finally decided to become an EMT. Just before we got married I got certified as an EMT-basic and began working for a local convalescent transport company making 11 dollars an hour. I worked for them “Granny Snatchin” for a little over a year before I got hired with Piedmont EMS in Rock Hill South Carolina. Getting the job was the fruition of my goal to be on a real meat wagon working EMS. Shortly after taking that job we bought our first house, which they wouldn’t allow us to buy with me on the mortgage. Wendy financed it herself with the income from her successful business as a wedding photographer. We got a really good deal. 3.65 acres surrounded by woods in the middle of the city of Rock Hill. The house was 1450 square feet with a detached 800 sqft garage. We paid 110,000 dollars with an APR of 7% fixed, which wasn’t that bad for the time. A year later the housing market collapsed.

2007 was also the year that I ran into JHK’s “The Long Emergency,” and got schooled on peak oil. Up to this point I had never heard of the idea and had never even thought about infinite growth on a finite planet. Up to that point I was unaware that our problems were much more ominous than the Illuminati’s NWO. Reading TLE was the first step on the stair case of reality and not conspiracy theory for me. I didn’t let go of the Illuminati easily at first, but Alex Jones and I had to break up. He’s a peak oil denier, and I couldn’t deny the truth of peak oil and therefore couldn’t reconcile why he would deny it. I moved on to Richard Heinberg, Michael Ruppert, Dimitri Orlov, and John Michael Greer.

Up to this point in my life I had never owned any land or seen the need to grow any food. I started gardening organically right out of the gates. Then I started prepping and dealing with the roller coaster ride that learning about peak oil becomes for anybody who doesn’t decide to bury their head in the sand. I debated for a long time about whether to procreate or not. Wendy pretty much just took my word for it on the PO front. She was too busy running her business to notice or really care about PO and mostly just placated my concerns about the future. She wanted a child, and so did I, it was just the future I was concerned about. How could I willingly bring a child into a world that was on Hubbert’s bumpy plateau? A couple of years of PO study and obsession goes by and we decide to have a child. In 2010 my son Ayden Zen was born.

My wife’s business began to tank due to negative returns on technology. Digital camera technology is so good now that any dumb ass soccer mom can take 5000 pictures at a wedding and then photoshop 500 or so of them into descent pictures. Talent is rapidly dissolving into technology in photography. Camera equipment is very expensive, and this is part of the reason why photography got so expensive. Now rich soccer moms get their 3000 dollar camera along with thousands of dollars in related equipment and editing soft ware and they’re in business. They can undercut the professionals because they are just playing for egoistic reasons and not concerned with paying bills cause their husbands handle all of that. In our case, my 28,000 dollar a year (gross income, I brought home 2000 a month) just paid for the vehicles and our house and I was out of money before I was even paid. Our son arrived and Wendy’s business was on the downward spiral.

I was extremely stressed out by all of these changes. Wendy felt guilty about her money going away which put her in a bad mood, which further strained our relationship. I was stressed out trying to live a 40,000 dollar lifestyle on 28,000 dollars with no feasible way to better my situation. My son added an entire new layer of stress to all of this. Healthcare was slowly changing from something I loved to something I hated due to all of the governmental changes. We went from patients to customers, and I began hating all of the new bureaucracies that became inherent in the new healthcare landscape. What I had was a house that was falling apart. A house that was a ticking time bomb fit to explode and leave us with a leaking roof, no heat, cockroaches, and thousands of other things that needed to be maintained with no money to maintain any of it. All my career working on the meat wagon was doing was keeping us from drowning, for the time being. I broke and ended up on fukitol for a short period of time. If you’ve been following Epiphany now for the last year, than you’ll likely know what’s transpired since then. It not, have a look around.

This post pretty much concludes my autobiographical stint, at least in any kind of chronological order. I’ll be wrapping it up with one more post along with Jason Heppenstall and WHD (who’s apparently going to begin and end his auto offering in one post soon). I’ll save you any suspense cause we’ve got enough of that waiting on Jason. I’m just going to be writing a conclusion blog. I won’t be concluding Epiphany Now, but I’ll more than likely be slowing down. January 9th I’m going to be taking 13 hours of college prerequisites for the RN program at our local community college, plus I’m gonna be going back to work granny snatchin’ part time. It’s come to that. I’ve got to pay the monkey. My wife is five months along into our second pregnancy. We have no income for 2013 unless I go back to work. We just found out yesterday that we’re having another boy and the ultrasound revealed no abnormalities. After all of this, I’m going to be plugging back into the Matrix. I’ll be talking about that and my plans for the future in my next post.

The Dynamics of a Dysfunctional Relationship.

Much has been written about personal relationships that are destructive. Because such relationships often revolve around family life, with relatively few individuals involved, the dynamics at play are fairly obvious once one looks at such interactions objectively.

Currently the majority of families in western society are patriarchal in nature. When such patriarchal families become destructive it is often the patriarch that becomes the abuser. There are a number of known solutions to surviving and growing out of such destructive relationships.

Each and every human being is a member of the human race (family). Because the number of individuals involved in the ‘human’ family is in the billions the dynamics of interaction at work are far more difficult to comprehend. It is obvious because of the quality of life of many humans that the overall human family is also dysfunctional in nature.

I suggest that although the numbers involved in the human race are much larger than in individual human families, the dynamics that define the relationships between individuals are identical in both instances, except for in scope.

Abuses heaped on single individuals within families are identical to those heaped on whole races, societies, nations, regions, and groups within the human race.

If the dynamics are identical at both both scopes, individual family and human race, are the solutions also identical, except for in scope? I believe so.

With this hope I will explore the nature of the known problems and solutions applying to individual dysfunctional families and then extrapolate these ideas and apply them to the human race as a whole. Perhaps this exercise will shed some light on how we as races, societies, nations, regions, groups, and individuals can protect our selves within the dynamics that motivate the human race.

A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often child neglect or abuse on the part of individual parents occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is normal. Dysfunctional families are primarily a result of co-dependent adults, and may also be affected by addictions, such as substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, etc.), or sometimes an untreated mental illness.[1] Dysfunctional parents may emulate or are sometimes over-correcting from their own dysfunctional parents. In some cases, a “child-like” parent will allow the dominant parent to abuse their children.[1]

Examples
Dysfunctional family members have common features and behavior patterns as a result of their experiences within the family structure. This tends to reinforce the dysfunctional behavior, either through enabling or perpetuation. The family unit can be affected by a variety of factors.[4]

Common features
Near universal
These features occur in most dysfunctional families:

Lack of empathy, understanding, and sensitivity towards certain family members, while expressing extreme empathy towards one or more members (or even pets) who have real or perceived “special needs”. In other words, one family member continuously receives far more than he or she deserves, while another is marginalized.
Denial (refusal to acknowledge abusive behavior, possibly believing that the situation is normal or even beneficial; also known as the “elephant in the room.”)
Inadequate or missing boundaries for self (e.g., tolerating inappropriate treatment from others, failing to express what is acceptable and unacceptable treatment, tolerance of physical, emotional or sexual abuse.)
Disrespect of others’ boundaries (e.g. physical contact that other person dislikes; breaking important promises without just cause; purposefully violating a boundary another person has expressed)
Extremes in conflict (either too much fighting or insufficient peaceful arguing between family members)
Unequal or unfair treatment of one or more family members due to their birth order, gender, age, family role (mother, etc.), abilities, race, caste, etc. (may include frequent appeasement of one member at the expense of others, or an uneven enforcement of rules)

Tongue in Cheek …

Abusive Father Can’t Wait To See The Art He’s Inspiring His Kids To Create

CODY, WY—Describing the years of psychological torment he has in­flicted upon his two children James, 14, and Amber, 9, local tax attorney Ted Sheehan told reporters Thursday he couldn’t wait to see what kind of art his abuse would inspire them to create when they grow up.

The 37-year-old father said he could only imagine how his son and daughter’s unstable upbringing might manifest itself in future writings, paintings, or music, given the way he routinely ridicules their achievements, yells at their mother in drunken fits of rage, and threatens the family with physical violence.

“My constant petty bullying alone ought to be worth a couple novels or screenplays—maybe even a solo museum exhibit,” said Sheehan, noting that even when his children do get a break from his verbal abuse, they still suffer from total emotional abandonment. “We’re not talking here about your ordinary, everyday withholding of approval, either. Most of the time, I’m actively undermining and belittling them. Definitely stuff that could be channeled into unique art emblematic of the isolated, tortured nature of human existence.”

“After 18 years of life in that kind of menacing environment, you could easily be looking at the next Jackson Pollock and Sylvia Plath,” he added. (continued…)

Insecure men can wreak havoc in any relationship; recognizing signs of insecurity and then being strong enough to deal with the situation can save wasted years and many tears in the long run.

Insecurity can manifest itself in many ways, but a couple of personality types are the most common and recognizable.

Openly Insecure Men
This type of personality can drain patience and strength from others, especially a girlfriend or life partner. Here are some traits that openly insecure men may exhibit:

Constantly clamoring for praise and reassurance
An inability to make decisions
Inappropriate social behavior and conversation
Overly polite to the point of annoyance due to fear of offending
Poor posture to the point of actually walking bent over
Occasional violent outbursts that are inappropriate in relation to triggers
Heavy drinking, alcoholism, or drug addiction

Narcissistic Men
This personality type can overwhelm and batter another, causing intense psychic pain and sometimes physical pain, as well. Despite the strong-arm tactics, however, this personality type is often born from an intense sense of insecurity. The narcissism, where the man is focused only on his pleasure and desires, develops to hide that insecurity. Here are some traits that narcissists may exhibit:

Verbally insulting and abusive
Physically and/or sexually abusive
An inability to see or validate another’s point of view
Affections that run hot and cold, depending on the narcissist’s mood and needs
Manipulative

Dealing with Insecure Men

Unfortunately, no one can change and grow unless they desire to themselves. Here are some tactics to try to deal with insecure men:

Talk openly with the man; point out habits that are annoying, troublesome, or painful, and then give him a chance to speak openly about his feelings, if he is willing.

If one-on-one communication is not possible, see if he is willing to try couples counseling.
If he is not, ask him if he will consider individual counseling or therapy.

Sometimes there is nothing to do but walk away from undeniable insecurity or narcissism. Whether it means simply breaking up, or it means a divorce and all of the complications that can bring, be aware that the insecure man must first want to grow for himself and let go of painful habits and old beliefs that no longer serve him.

This is where strength comes in for life partners or those dating insecure men. The trial comes whether the man is willing to help himself in order to save his relationship, or if he is not, then having to make the decision to turn away from his harmful behavior.

A sense of power over others is as addictive as any substance that allows one to escape physical reality. Substance ‘abuse’ is often the result of finding one’s reality unacceptable. Power ‘abuse’ is often the result of finding one’s self unacceptable. The adulation, forced or otherwise, of others reassures the power addict of their own worth. Like other drugs ‘power’ is addictive and constant use requires ever larger doses to attain the same level of high.

Power really does corrupt as scientists claim it’s as addictive as cocaine
By Daily Mail Reporter

The life cycle of addiction begins with a problem, discomfort or some form of emotional or physical pain a person is experiencing. They find this very difficult to deal with.

We start off with an individual who, like most people in our society, is basically good. This person encounters a problem or discomfort that they do not know how to resolve or cannot confront. This could include problems such as difficulty “fitting in” as a child or teenager, anxiety due to peer pressure or work expectations, identity problems or divorce as an adult. It can also include physical discomfort, such as an injury or chronic pain.

The person experiencing the discomfort has a real problem. He feels his present situation is unendurable, yet sees no good solution to the problem. Everyone has experienced this in life to a greater or lesser degree. The difference between an addict and the non-addict is that the addict chooses drugs or alcohol as a solution to the unwanted problem or discomfort.

This person tries drugs or alcohol. The drugs APPEAR to solve his problem. He feels better. Because he now SEEMS better able to deal with life, the drugs become valuable to him. The person looks on drugs or alcohol as a cure for unwanted feelings. The painkilling effects of drugs or alcohol become a solution to their discomfort.

Inadvertently the drug or alcohol now becomes valuable because it helped them feel better. This release is the main reason a person uses drugs or drinks a second or third time. It is just a matter of time before he becomes fully addicted and loses the ability to control his drug use.

Drug addiction, then, results from excessive or continued use of physiologically habit-forming drugs in an attempt to resolve the underlying symptoms of discomfort or unhappiness.

The Addiction Progresses.

Analogous to an adolescent child in his first love affair, the use of drugs or alcohol becomes obsessive. The addicted person is trapped. Whatever problem he was initially trying to solve by using drugs or alcohol fades from memory. At this point, all he can think about is getting and using drugs. He loses the ability to control his usage and disregards the horrible consequences of his actions.

Alcohol And Drug Tolerance

In addition to the mental stress created by his unethical behavior, the addict’s body has also adapted to the presence of the drugs. He will experience an overwhelming obsession with getting and using his drugs, and will do anything to avoid the pain of withdrawing from them. This is when the newly-created addict begins to experience drug cravings.

He now seeks drugs both for the reward of the “pleasure” they give him, and also to avoid the mental and physical horrors of withdrawal. Ironically, the addict’s ability to get “high” from the alcohol or drug gradually decreases as his body adapts to the presence of foreign chemicals. He must take more and more, not just to get an effect but often just to function at all.

At this point, the addict is stuck in a vicious dwindling spiral. The drugs he abuses have changed him both physically and mentally. He has crossed an invisible and intangible line. He is now a drug addict or alcoholic.

How to assess an abusive relationship.

Are you attracted to abusive men? Here are the top 10 signs of an abusive man.

Abusive men are often survivors of abuse themselves. Signs of an abusive man can range from emotional, verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. Frequently an emotionally abusive man is also a verbally abusive man or a combination of all abuse types. A sign of an abusive man can usually be found after a few dates if you pay attention, ask a lot of questions and do some investigating into his past.

Abusive relationships are characterized by control games, violence, jealousy and withholding sex and emotional contact. An emotionally abusive man is harder to pin-point and a skilled, abusive man can easily make you think you aren’t good enough or that everything is your fault. It is just as difficult to recover from emotional abuse as it is from physical abuse. Emotional abuse causes low self-esteem and depression. An abusive man may tell you he loves you or that he will change, so you won’t leave. However, the more times you take him back, the more control he will gain. Empty promises become the norm. Make sure you pay attention to his actions and not merely his words. As the old saying goes, “actions speak louder than words.”

Abusive relationships are never abusive in the beginning. If they were, women would dump the abusive men immediately in search of a good man.According to the American Psychological Association Force on Violence and Family, over 4 million American women experience a serious assault by a partner each year! Who can forget when heavy-weight champ Mike Tyson was convicted of raping Desiree Washington and sentenced to six years in prison. Tyson served three years before being released on parole. Thereafter, he married Robin Givens but they divorced on Valentine’s Day only a year later because Givens claimed Tyson abused her. Abusive behavior touches all ranges of society.

We have broken down the top 10 signs of an abusive man. If your partner exhibits one or more of these signs, it may be time to reevaluate your relationship and seek help or get out.

1. Jealousy & Possessiveness

– Becomes jealous over your family, friends, co-workers. Tries to isolate you. Views his woman and children as his property instead of as unique individuals. Accuses you of cheating or flirting with other men without cause. Always asks where you’ve been and with whom in an accusatory manner.

2. Control

– He is overly demanding of your time and must be the center of your attention. He controls finances, the car, and the activities you partake in. Becomes angry if woman begins showing signs of independence or strength.

3. Superiority – He is always right, has to win or be in charge. He always justifies his actions so he can be “right” by blaming you or others. A verbally abusive man will talk down to you or call you names in order to make himself feel better. The goal of an abusive man is to make you feel weak so they can feel powerful. Abusers are frequently insecure and this power makes them feel better about themselves.

4. Manipulates

– Tells you you’re crazy or stupid so the blame is turned on you. Tries to make you think that it’s your fault he is abusive. Says he can’t help being abusive so you feel sorry for him and you keep trying to “help” him. Tells others you are unstable.

5. Mood Swings – His mood switches from aggressive and abusive to apologetic and loving after the abuse has occurred.

6. Actions don’t match words

– He breaks promises, says he loves you and then abuses you.

7. Punishes you

– An emotionally abusive man may withhold sex, emotional intimacy, or plays the “silent game” as punishment when he doesn’t get his way. He verbally abuses you by frequently criticizing you.

8. Unwilling to seek help – An abusive man doesn’t think there is anything wrong with him so why should he seek help? Does not acknowledge his faults or blames it on his childhood or outside circumstances.

9. Disrespects women

– Shows no respect towards his mother, sisters, or any women in his life. Thinks women are stupid and worthless.

10. Has a history of abusing women and/or animals or was abused himself

– Batterers repeat their patterns and seek out women who are submissive and can be controlled. Abusive behavior can be a generational dysfunction and abused men have a great chance of becoming abusers. Men who abuse animals are much more likely to abuse women also.

If you continue to stay in an abusive relationship because you think he will change and start treating you well, think again. An abusive man does not change without long-term therapy. Group counseling sessions are particularly helpful in helping abusive men recognize their abusive patterns.

Type A personality types seem to be more prone to abusive behavior due to their aggressive nature. Drugs and alcohol can create or further escalate an abusive relationship. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are excellent programs for an addict. The abuser’s partner should also seek help for their codependent behavior at Codependents Anonymous. If the abusive man is not willing to seek help, then you must take action by protecting yourself and any children involved by leaving. By staying in an abusive relationship you are condoning it. If you are scared you won’t be able to survive because of finances, pick up the phone book and start calling shelters. Try calling family, friends and associates and ask them if they can help or know of ways to help.

Once you leave, the abuser may cry and beg for forgiveness but don’t go back until you have spoken to his counselor and he has completed long-term therapy successfully. Be prepared for the abuse to increase after you leave because the abuser has lost control. The Bureau of Justice Statistics states that on the average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day so please be careful. If you partner is not willing to seek help for his abusive behavior, your only option is to leave.

Written by

Abuse Expert, Stephany Alexander, B.A., Author, Women’s Speaker
Credentials: Stephany Alexander is the founder of www.WomanSavers.com, one of the most popular women’s sites on the net (top 5%) receiving millions of hits per month.

The overwhelming consensus of those knowledgeable about abusive relationships is that the only option to stop the abuse within such relationships is to leave them. There is minimal chance that an abusive partner will change. Here’s some thoughts to help assess the possibility of change allowing you to stay in such a relationship.

As you face the decision to either end the abusive relationship or try to save it, keep the following things in mind:
If you’re hoping your abusive partner will change… The abuse will probably happen again. Abusers have deep emotional and psychological problems. While change is not impossible, it isn’t quick or easy. And change can only happen once your abuser takes full responsibility for his behavior, seeks professional treatment, and stops blaming you, his unhappy childhood, stress, work, his drinking, or his temper.

If you believe you can help your abuser… It’s only natural that you want to help your partner. You may think you’re the only one who understands him or that it’s your responsibility to fix his problems. But the truth is that by staying and accepting repeated abuse, you’re reinforcing and enabling the abusive behavior. Instead of helping your abuser, you’re perpetuating the problem.

If your partner has promised to stop the abuse… When facing consequences, abusers often plead for another chance, beg for forgiveness, and promise to change. They may even mean what they say in the moment, but their true goal is to stay in control and keep you from leaving. But most of the time, they quickly return to their abusive behavior once they’ve been forgiven and they’re no longer worried that you’ll leave.

If your partner is in counseling or a program for batterers… Even if your partner is in counseling, there is no guarantee that he’ll change. Many abusers who go through counseling continue to be violent, abusive, and controlling. If your partner has stopped minimizing the problem or making excuses, that’s a good sign. But you still need to make your decision based on who he is now, not the man you hope he will become.

If you’re worried about what will happen if you leave… You may be afraid of what your abusive partner will do, where you’ll go, or how you’ll support yourself or your children. But don’t let fear of the unknown keep you in a dangerous, unhealthy situation.

Signs that your abuser is NOT changing:

* He minimizes the abuse or denies how serious it really was.

* He continues to blame others for his behavior.

* He claims that you’re the one who is abusive.

* He pressures you to go to couple’s counseling.

* He tells you that you owe him another chance.

* You have to push him to stay in treatment.

* He says that he can’t change unless you stay with him and support him.

* He tries to get sympathy from you, your children, or your family and friends.

* He expects something from you in exchange for getting help.

* He pressures you to make decisions about the relationship.

APPLYING THE ABOVE IDEAS TO THE LARGER FOCUS OF THE HUMAN RACE

Our leaders, be they social, political, commercial, or hidden behind the curtain, are the equivalent of the powerful partner in our common societal relationship. We the masses are the preyed upon partner. Using the analysis above, are there signs the leadership class is mostly abusive in nature? My answer to this question is, “yes, overwhelmingly so”.

How can this be? These people seem so sure of themselves and live lives of luxury and freedom(?) beyond our dreams. Why would they be abusive towards others?

With the access to information that the internet made possible it has become obvious a very small group of families in the leadership class have over many generations managed to consolidate the vast majority of worldly power and wealth to themselves. They have managed to do this by forcibly indoctrinating their young to carry on their legacy. If the founders of this legacy where abusive to their kin then their abusive traits would be forwarded through each subsequent generation.

Imagine the pressure on you from your parents and peers if you were the heir to a legacy created by those obsessed with wealth and power. The societal pressures we the masses feel are nothing compared to the pressures the children of the elite of our society feel. They may have untold wealth and luxury but they live in a meat grinder where they do as they are told or are destroyed.

Personally there isn’t enough money in the world for me to desire to be in their shoes.

With the multi-generational abuse they have been subjected to and the undeniable power and wealth they have collected, the chances of the leadership class changing their own ways are remote if not nil.

The vast majority of humans are still in denial that they are in an abusive relationship with their leaders.

The truth movement on the internet has gotten to the point of realizing they are being abused by their leaders.

The truth movement is still mostly in denial that the only viable option to surviving such a relationship is to leave it.

The truth movement is kidding itself that change within the relationship is possible.

Part of the truth movement is convinced it can overpower the abusive partner. This might be possible but what does meeting violence with violence (whether verbal or physical) accomplish? Do you then only become the dominant partner in an abusive relationship? Is that any better than being the victim?

Escaping this relationship.

The societal infrastructure and economy we live within is the home we cohabit with our abusive partner which they control. As long as we remain within it we remain under their thumb. As long as we cooperate with them in maintaining this home we enable our continued abuse.

For most of us stepping outside this home appears to be an insurmountable problem and our abusive partner keeps reinforcing that idea at every opportunity.

The hard truth is that regardless of how difficult this step is, it is the only direction to survival without abuse. The situation is do or die regardless of the cost involved. We either continue to put up with abuse or we do what is necessary to remove ourselves from the abusive situation.

There is a lengthy bit of documentation, which there is not room to include here, that demonstrates clearly that abuse based on addiction continuously escalates and becomes more destructive in nature. It takes more and more of a substance to reach the same high because our body builds a tolerance to an often used substance.

The abuse we are currently seeing from our leaders is the result of their addiction to power and is not set in scope. It will continue to escalate and become worse over time. Most uncontrolled addicts continuously escalate their addiction until it finally kills them. They will generally take those that enabled them down with them.

Escaping ‘their’ house is not just a physical process, it is also spiritual in nature (combined and balanced emotional and logical realization).

After we accept that we are in an unsolvable abusive relationship the next step is to prepare to step out of it.

After we are prepared we make the step of leaving keeping in mind the information from above.

Once you leave, the abuser may cry and beg for forgiveness but don’t go back until you have spoken to his counselor and he has completed long-term therapy successfully. Be prepared for the abuse to increase after you leave because the abuser has lost control. The Bureau of Justice Statistics states that on the average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day so please be careful. If you partner is not willing to seek help for his abusive behavior, your only option is to leave.

Speaking from personal experience…. The problem of finding an alternative lifestyle appears more formidable than it actually is. With determination and perseverance it is still possible to find happiness and survivability outside of the abuser’s house. Looking back after a period you will shake your head in wonder at how limited the reality you used to live in was.

A really important point to consider – Our common human house is much more complex than the average family. You are not the only abused person in the greater relationship. There are billions being abused just like you are. The abuser is dependent on the combined efforts of all those they abuse to keep them in their position of power. As abused individuals we can do little to help each other and escaping our self will not greatly inconvenience the abuser. However until we help ourselves we cannot help others and each and everyone of us that says enough is enough and steps out of abuse is another chink in the armor of the abuser. Eventually as more people escape abuse it will become easier for them to effectively help those still caught in the clutches of abuse.

Forgiveness – is often mentioned as an essential component of becoming well once again after surviving abuse. A great thought I came across today on the internet. “You are not forgiving their actions, you are forgiving their debt.” This allows you to move on in your life without being held back by your past experiences.

Watson often likes to use metaphors from Poker when analysing the collapse dynamic, since Poker is his Game. Similarly, I like to use Chess metaphors, since Chess is my game. So I will explore this a bit with this post.

In some regards Poker might be considered the better metaphor, if you accept that there is an element of chance involved in all the decisions being made along the way in the game. If you take into account such things as Natural Disasters like the Sendai Quake or Katrina, you can make the case that some aspects of the collapse are governed by chance.

However, on the Financial level and structural societal level of building an Industrial Culture, no chance was ever involved in that. A series of Moves were made early on in the game to gain a much stronger position for Black here, Black being a representation for the Illuminati/Elite of society. White representing J6P is very much backed into a corner here now and Black controls most of the board.

Conventional tactics can no longer play a Winning Game for White. However, White still does have a few Pieces in play like the OWS Castle, the Boys in Black Pajamas (Anarchists) Knights, and Bishop Bloggers, handling the Keyboard is Mightier than the AR-15 aspect of the Propaganda battle. White also has many more Pawns on the board than Black does, and remember in this Chess game you aren’t limited to 64 Squares and only 8 Pawns. Much bigger Numbers we are dealing with here, but still it is not a random game of Chance, rather a game of Strategy and Position.

What is White to do here? Given the Numbers differential, Sacrificing a few Pawns likely can recapture a portion of the Board. this can give the Castle of OWS room to maneuver, and give the Boys in Black Pajamas Anarchist Knights cover from which to operate. Together, they can hopefully open a Column to Advance a Pawn to the 8th Rank and Queen that Pawn.

Once White has a new Queen on the Board, the advantage that Black has here is substantially reduced. Again though, since we are working with much greater numbers and a Global chessboard, you are really talking about many Pawns being Sacrificed in order for a few Queens to be made in the game.

In Chess or in Poker, there is only one Goal, which is to WIN. No concern in either game about Ethics, Morals or an Afterlife. If you clutter up your betting in a Poker game with thoughts about the fact if you Bankrupt one of the other players his kids might go Hungry, its going to affect your betting. You can’t do that if you want to Win the Game. Simlarly in Chess, if you feel sorry for the other player because he is a bit dimwitted and makes some stupid moves, if you let him go and don’t capitalize on those errors, you also don’t win. You see an Error, BAM you hit him with everything you got and capitalize on the error.

This debate here is of course cluttered up with many arguments about morality and ethics, and because of that developing a Winning Strategy for the Game here, Poker or Chess is quite impossible. Neither game takes morals and ethics into consideration, so they are not good metaphors to use as long as that is part of the argument.

In the final analysis here for me though, because of the nature of the collapse, morals and ethics are becoming ever less a part of the game we play on the World Stage. Clearly, the Illuminati are not sticking to any Code of Law here, so if J6P continues to stick to some abstract set of principles that the Illuminati are NOT sticking to, he is going to lose this battle.

In the creation of a new society and a Better tomorrow, having Good Ethics and a solid Moral Structure is important for the health of the society. Perhaps the biggest problem we have now is that pretty much since Ag became the social meme, we have not had either good ethics or good morality. Unfortunately here, to establish better ones, we first have to Win this Game as it stands, and only unconventional tactics can do that now.

The Orkin man is one of RE's favorite memes, often invoked as a symbol of retribution by the meek against the great. When we watch gangsters confiscate houses with impunity and murder by proxy and a pen (see the story of Norman Rousseau), run the economy into a ditch, commandeered great bonuses and be subject to none of the usual proceedings of justice, it is easy to despair and to look for revenge. This overwritten screed is a meditation upon what has become a thought-provoking thread rife with implications, a thought experiment which, if followed through the course of its own ineluctable logic, obliges each of us to measure where we would fall, and what we would do, in the event TSHTF.

What has actually happened here in this country on these rare occasions when people have stood up en masse to Fight the Power? In a previous lifetime, I investigated and created a documentary about the Battle at Blair Mountain. You will likely not have heard of this, the teaching of labor history having apparently been classified as a Class I misdemeanor here in the FSA. In the largest uprising in the United States outside of the Civil War, in 1921, thousands of miners waged armed warfare in Logan County, West Virginia against mine owners, sheriff Don Chafin, and federal troops, in an effort to unionize the mines.

In Mingo, Logan and McDowell counties, miners worked under incredibly bad conditions, were paid next to nothing, had no freedom of speech or assembly, and were dispatched with impunity by mine guards and local politicos in an atmosphere reminiscent of a third-world dictatorship, or contemporary South Carolina. In 1921, thousands of miners and families were evicted from their tents after having the temerity to join a union. The Miners’ March, as it was called, was set to change all that. The military was engaged, as always, to Protect Property Rights, those most sacred and revered of all rights extended by the Hand of God to the white, male property owners who created the FSA. The miners’ intention was to march to the southwestern coalfields and free fellow miners from abominable treatment at the hands or mine owners.

The miners were opposed by a well-armed contingent of mine guards and State Police with rifles and machine guns. These would eventually be joined by 2,000 regular Army troops armed with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. The two forces met at Blair Mountain, in Logan County, along the ridge line.

This was the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The battle marked the first time U.S. troops were ordered to bomb civilians. Federal troops squared off against citizen miners, many themselves veterans hardened from recent service in WW I.

The union leader Bill Blizzard eventually surrendered his army in order to avoid further civilian casualties. Blizzard was acquitted in court of insurrection. Future UMW & CIO leader John L. Lewis fought alongside Blizzard at the Battle of Blair Mountain and succeeded in getting recognition for the union 14 years later in southern West Virginia.

One of the songs that sprung up in the wake of these labor troubles with the song "Which side are you on?" It was written by Florence Reece, the wife a union organizer for the UMW in Harlan County, Kentucky, when the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners called the Harlan County War. In an attempt to intimidate the Reece family, the local sheriff illegally entered their family home in search of Sam Reece. Sam had been warned in advance and escaped, but Florence and their children were terrorized in his place. That night, after the men had gone, Florence wrote the lyrics to "Which Side Are You On?" on a calendar that hung in the kitchen of her home. She took the melody from a traditional Baptist hymn, "Lay the Lily Low." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On%3F)

A Song by Florence Patton Reece

Come all of you good workers
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell

Chorus
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner
And I'm a miner's son
And I'll stick with the union
Till every battle's won

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?

Don't scab for the bosses
Don't listen to their lies
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize

So the miners organized together to Fight the Power, to take the law into their own hands because the law was an ass. What they got for their trouble was the full response of the state in all of its Majesty and force of arms. Eventually the legal system would catch up. In the fullness of time, union rights would be recognized, at least until after World War II, when the elites mounted their counterrevolution under the banner of "right to work” laws.

In my loathing for the Banksters and their apologists, I take a back seat to nobody. The bailout of 2008, otherwise known as the "banksters coup," was just the cherry on top of the same toxic milkshake served up as economic and social policy over the last 30 years. The insane clown posse that passes for the modern Republican Party has eyeballed the demographic trends, and pasted together an assemblage of what Drfitglass called "the scattered,raving remnants of the Confederacy for one, last glorious bonfire of democracy." Combine the wholesale assault of the remnant of the New Deal in an atmosphere of "industrialized political hatespeech," Fox News, Hate Radio and the Tea Party with its Billionaire backers, and it's easy to succumb to the desire to want to kill something.

Intellectually I hold with Kunstler's "lamppost and 40 feet of sturdy nylon rope" as the due for the "masters of the universe "who have ground down our economy and wrecked the ship of state. But personal morality makes looping the first skein of rope over the lamppost morally fraught. On the other hand, one is left with the spectacle of the pigmen rooting among the remains of the economy and the country, like Wu's pigs disposing of a fresh corpse in HBO's "Deadwood."

The Orkin man is a favorite device of RE, the invoking of which I have enjoyed since the same since his days on The Burning Platform blog. The Orkin man is an exterminator who cleanses the dwelling of lice, vermin, termites and all manner of infestations. The analogy is clear. The remedy less so.

One poster on Doomsday Diner posed the question, "Who gets to be the Orkin man?” Indeed. Who gets to be the decider? Being the decider has great costs, which turned on a fundamental moral issue, at a time when our moral and spiritual institutions are in decline, church attendance down, and many people utterly and completely unequipped to weigh moral and ethical questions. And as much as I like to give voice to my inner hunchback, there is that "judge not lest ye be judged" morality imbued by a Catholic education and nun-beatings that inflects one's thoughts, processes and decisions, even decades later.

As I reflected on the more recent exemplars of individuals taking on such a strategy in this country, and after Blair Mountain, my mind skittered to thoughts of Kosovo, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Pinochet's Argentina, and then settled on the best recent example: Pol Pot whose efforts to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country's population from starvation, overwork and executions. Those Khmer Rouge wanted to return to the land as well, and also wanted to cleanse the parasites, userers and useless eaters from the face of Cambodia. A cautionary tale about the work of idealists who want to remake a society by means of "cleansing" the "parasites…"

It took a while for ol' Pol to consolidate power– he needed to throw in with Sihanouk to fight the right wing junta the US had installed, then the US had to leave the 'Nam and Cambodia. But once in power, he began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia that would warm the heart of the most doomy doomster. Pol Pot had seen Mao's Cultural Revolution first-hand during a visit to Communist China, so he figured to go The Great Yellow River Swimmer one better.

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of "class enemies, " a move that would apparently gain favor among participants in this thread. Pol Pot now stood up his own "Super Duper New and Improved Great Leap Forward" in Cambodia, which in itself was new and improved, hence renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

Remember Pol Pot's ringing declaration, "This is Year Zero?" Ah, search your memories. Society was to be "purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences to be extinguished. Intellectuals, bureaucrats and other glasses-wearers were to push wheelbarrows, the better to repent of their pointy-headedness, and to learn the glories of peasant Communism. Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed, foreign economic or medical assistance refused. No use of foreign languages. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. (That will kick those usurers in the ass.) Businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world, almost as effectively as if information were controlled by a small handful of media companies.

Something about that live-or-die thingy tends to bring out the excesses in our revolutionary heroes. I'll put that in my "Robespierre was overworked and misunderstood" file.

Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. All of Cambodia's cities were forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way. Can't let that stop a man with a purpose.

Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot's "killing fields" where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days, the better to become compost and improve the yields.

Workdays ran to the 18 hour day, Pol having taken the American South's "right to work" euphemism to heart. The starving were forbidden to eat the fruits and rice they were harvesting, as that was confiscated by the Khmer rouge and loaded onto their own trucks.

And you can't have a party without the purges… a veritable binge of purges. Up against the wall went the remnants of the "old society" – the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, glasses-wearers all, no doubt. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Eventually the taste for human blood leads to a paranoia of sorts, and why not? Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.

The casualty count rose until Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed, and a Vietnamese puppet government put in.

Pol Pot disappeared into the jungles of Thailand with his Khmer Rouge remnant and waged guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments for decades, eventually sputtering out and dying of an apparent heart attack before he could be dragged to trial before an international tribunal.

So it matters little who you pick as the Orkin Man, or how good your motives are, or how thorough your efforts at re-education or eradication may be. The role seems to carry some occupational hazards, as if the appetite for blood, human death and destruction carries with it the seeds of insanity.

Although the image of banksters and stockbrokers mucking out pigpens and pushing wheelbarrows through knee-deep mud remains compelling.

But point was that any kind of social engineering, social cleansing, ethnic cleansing executed by a political agenda will inevitably collapse, most often due to its own corruption and increasingly escalating paranoia on the part of the strongman or the secret oligarchy of "deciders." There is a reason that we are taught from a very early age, "vengeance is mine saith the Lord, ” "Thou shalt not kill," and other Biblical admonishments against the taking of life. It could be that this ancient wisdom recalls that wielding the tools of vengeance is simply above the pay grade of us mere mortals. On the other hand, psychopaths recognize no such compunction. But the question remains: what do we do, what action should we take at a time when psychopaths have commandeered the engines of government and commerce, economic or rate with complete impunity and beyond the reach of such justice as still remains?

In response to such musings, RE posted the following:

RE:

Here of course is the EXCESS which occurs in many an Inqusition/Reign of Terror type scenario. There is going to be a lot of BLOWBACK resultant from many people who have lost their comfortable life and who want to see PPII DEAD because of that. He gets blamed for the problems they have; he gets blamed for their loss of economic status in the society. So PPII gets PARANOID, for good reason. People really ARE out to get him. So he starts Killing Them before they Kill Him. //

So all of them go down in History as the most vicious and Genocidal Dictators in all of Recorded History, at least in gross numbers if not in Percentages . . .

Moving into the FUTURE here, the issue is you cannot even Save As Many as you Can by PLAYING BALL with the Illuminati. Why? Because said Illuminati are Fresh OUT of Cheap Oil to sell you with Loans they hand out to you. So unfortunately here in this Morton's Fork situation, the social dynamic is likely to produce numerous PPIIs and Great Uncle Joes. Because unless somebody does SOMETHING to try to keep the society organized up, the Dieing will be WORSE than it would be if you have some Dictator FORCING people to evacuate the Big Shities. They aren't going to do that on their own until it is too late and they all are starving and Cannibalizing each other.

We are thus faced with an untenable situation: if any one of us were to put on the Pol Pot T shirt, we would find ouselves in a similar situation, fraught with awful decisions and tinged by paranoia, regions of the mind visited by Joseph Conrad. Far preferable to remember the biblical injunctions that direct our conduct, as Ashvin observed:

Ashvin:

It's not about what we you and I can justify to ourselves with our personal beliefs. It is what you can get OTHER PEOPLE to accept based on their beliefs. Anyone who truly believes in Judeo-Christian theology cannot accept OMMP any more than they can accept Infanticide, even when they are committed with "good intentions" for some Utilitarian goal. According to them, God is perfect and they are imperfect. God has commanded them to avoid certain Sins, and they must have faith in God's wisdom no matter what. It is not up to them to decide what sins are acceptable via good intentions or utilitarian calculations.

Quote from: Matthew 7:14-27

14“For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

15“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16“You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17“So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18“A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19“Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20“So then, you will know them by their fruits.

21“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22“Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.’

24“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25“And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. 26“Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27“The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

I'm just using them as an example of people whose beliefs are fundamentally in opposition to OMMP. They will become your enemies… but them and who else? I think you can easily make the argument that most true Hindus and Buddhists will as well. Now we are easily talking about a lot of people. How many people who claim to believe in these Immortal Truths will have the nerve to follow through when your so-called Herd is stampeding against them? I don't know, probably only a small fraction.

But my point here is that some of them will, and people like me will admire them for doing so. It's an amazing thing, really, to have that kind of total devotion to some higher power even in the face of what appears to be the likely threat of species-wide extinction. Talk about a small gate and narrow way!

Yet as we abjure violence, the fact is that evil remains. RE remains adamant about proactively taking the fight to the Pigmen:

RE:

Regardless of the means here, whether it is Sepukku or Capital Punishment, the situation is going to create the BLOWBACK from people who once had power, now removed. They will attempt Counter Revolutions and so forth. So you get forced into a battle here no matter what, and people DIE no matter what.

Practical sort of fellow that I am, I work my way through this dynamic to try to find the pathway with the least pain and the greatest survivability for the typical Slave in our society. The means I see working best is to take the battle to the Illuminati before they get the Death Camps rolling in earnest here. You do have to wait for the Failure of the Conduits though, because as long as the Iluminati have the Big Ass Military and Gestapo organized up and functioning, you stand no chance here. Once those Conduits fracture though, the playing field is LEVELLED.

Then you don't just get MAD, you get EVEN.

In other words, when you observe that the Illuminati are engineering a significant die-off of the "excess" workforce, to bring the earth's carrying capacity in line with that proscribed by the Georgia Guidestones, what should the meek do? Stand obediently in line at the abattoir, or take the fight to the oppressors? As we all observe every day, there IS such a thing as evil. [There is an entire website (http://www.sott.net/) devoted to the subject of “ponerology” (the study of evil), for those who need a deeper dive into that sort of thing. I confess a somewhat light stomach for learning much more about the rarefied appetites of our elites, the Franklin affair and multiple pedophilia rings being enough to induce projectile vomiting . . .]

The question each of us has to address is, Which side are you on? If you knew that those in control were working to box you into a freight car headed to an unknown future, but which would likely involve Fresh Towels and Hot Showers, would you get on the train or would you take the fight to them? And would you take the fight to them knowing that they controlled all of the vectors and tools of violence with force overwhelming to individual scale? Indeed, our elites have changed the laws to enable the military to operate with impunity here in the "North American battleground" (yes, friends, if you are paying the least bit of attention, we are indeed the enemy), as they have likewise militarized our local police forces, complete with spiffy looking SWAT team suits, armored vehicles. and drones, as the latest invention. We have as our president the only Nobel Peace Prize winner with a personal kill list. So it may be well to say that we're living in a time where the lessons of history no longer inform what we may be able to infer about the future. All bets are off.

Ultimately, I hold with RE when he says, "save as many as you can," although we may differ about what that means. As an occupier, I believe that our presence in the streets and withholding our consent is everything that we can do. The community gardening movement is a step toward self-reliance, and teaching others to be self reliant. A self-reliant independent populace is anathema to the powers that be. But even the most psychopathic will find it difficult to dial-up a drone strike against a community garden, unless I miss my bet. Our resistance will be nonviolent, as the state has an utter and complete monopoly of the tools of violence, and a demonstrated increasing bloodthirstiness in applying them. I do not wish to make it easy for them, and have little desire to become a martyr, in a time when even bankster loan officers can murder with a pen and a computer.

Hunter S. Thompson once described himself as a "Road Man for the Lords of Karma." Since nature, or God bats last, my own view is that through education, self-reliance, and nonviolent resistance we can change a culture. The history of this society guarantees a rain of vengeance and disproportionate response on the part of the minions of the elites, in a road that runs from the Cherokee "Trail of Tears," though the gulag, through Logan Country through the paddies of Kampuchea to Zuccotti Park. And even if successful, the victors turn into monsters. Changing a society will take generations; generations which we may not have. Our opponents have been at this for many decades; we should not expect the quick fix.

In the coming days, each of us will need to stand up and be counted. At least I know which side I'm on.

The Illuminati has this wonderful attitude toward morality. They teach us by the age of 5 that violence against others is wrong. That stealing is wrong. By the age of 15 – killing and counterfeiting is wrong. And they are correct ………. except for the little exception that they reserve the right to do all of these things themselves. Violence is called the police and law. Stealing is called taxes. Killing is called capital punishment and war, and counterfeiting is the fractional reserve system and central banking. When we do it, it is a crime. When they do it, it is God’s work and societies redemption. Nice scam if you can pull it off. They’ve been doing well for at least 6000 years in some locales. Our world is a psychopath’s oyster.

You get all these alternative media spokesmen such as Max Keiser and the mythical Tyler Durden touting precious metals as currency, stating that fiat currency is the root of all evil. Well, the USA for one was on the gold standard from Hamilton’s first Bank of the United States until FDR pulled his little racket in 1933 when he outlawed gold for Joe and Jane Bagodonuts. But a history of this period indicates that it was no monetary Eden, because the snake in Eden is not fiat paper but the fractional reserve banking system. But do you hear Durden decrying the near infinite expansion and rehypothecation of credit? Well, not when it inconveniences him. When the CME raises the margin requirement on the gold contracts by one percent, he reacts like his novel’s namesake character when he was about to be castrated. And outlawing naked CDS’s? Well forget it. Worse than child abuse. Zero Hedge is not about to lead us into the Promised Land.

But the true reptile in the Garden seems to be fractional reserve banking. This is where certain crony capitalists are permitted to counterfeit money they don’t have. It purportedly began as overt fraud by the goldsmiths in 16th century Italy. At least in those days justice was swift and brutal when a bank run exposed the deceit. An occupational hazard that Jon Corzine believes himself, with good reason, to be immune to. I am sure we all know here that when you go to your local bank to get a loan to buy that hot new red sports car, the bank just makes up the money out of thin air and puts some electrons in your account. In theory, there was a time when they were suppose to have at least 10% of the counterfeited money either in stock equity or deposits, but this has been watered down to zero in the last 15 years. So the ratio to counterfeit becomes infinite.

Back in the mid 1700’s the colonies were issuing their own interest free scrip money and their economies were going great guns with hardly any inflation. The English Crown and the Bank of England were pissed at this because they were not getting their bankster cut of every transaction, so they outlawed colonial scrip at the point of a gun. The colonies went into an instant and severe depression. As Nicole Foss likes to say, money and credit is the SAE 10-40 of the economy’s engine. No money and the engine seizes up in a couple of blocks. Ben Franklin, an undisputed genius, stated bluntly on several occasions that by far the greatest reason behind the American revolution was the outlawing of colonial scrip. The truth was that the direct taxation on items such as tea was small potatoes. The Boston Tea Party was just a price fixing scam by some local jokesters. Of course they can’t teach this in the high schools as it might raise some embarrassing questions from students who haven’t had their brains shut down with fluoride, Ritalin, aspartame, MSG, or SSRI soma, assuming there are any left.

But even if you outlawed the banks from doing fractional reserve, would this end the problem? Well, as a plumber I use to buy a lot of stuff at the supply company. I always paid my tab on the first of the month, but they gave you an option to let it ride for a 2% monthly fee. This is de facto fractional reserve banking by a hardware store. Upon a little thought, the serpent is actually the concept of interest itself, otherwise known in previous centuries as usury. My Mac OS dictionary has the following definition.

usury |ˈyoō zh (ə)rē| noun the illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest. • archaic interest at such rates.

Well excuse me, Mac dictionary, but the archaic definition of usury was interest at any fucking rate. Winston must have dropped that down the memory hole.

Strangely enough, both the Vatican (in previous centuries) and Mohammed got this little fact about basic economics 100% right. Interest, i.e. usury, is the dark side of the force.

RE wrote:
I don’t know if these guys are truly Brain Dead and Stupid or if they are really Smart and just so locked into a paradigm they can’t grasp the truth here. Or if it is as El G suggests, they are Wickedly Brilliant and this is part of the Master plan. I will pick Door Number 2 on this one Monte.

I will take door number one. The elite are brilliant at theft and domination, but they have blind spots. How do you think any of the Rothschild’s would fair if dropped off in the Alaskan wilderness to survive for three weeks with no supplies. I do not believe in there is any satanic tricks or secret powers these guys have and I am sure they would starve like any other soft suburbanite.

I know that the Illuminati had a grand plan, a New World Order if you will. I am quite sure that the whole of the earth was to come under complete corporate domination, selling us EVERY SINGLE good or service we would ever use from the cradle to the grave. With super computers monitoring every single communication sent or received, thought crime immediately punished. We can see they are quite close to Global Governance and currency now.

The world however does not always cooperate as any fallen Emperor could attest. The Illuminati converted their empire to run on fossil fuels with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The magical energy gains from oil in particular made the New World Order the crowning achievement of all previous empires. As the men of science worked on zero point energy, fusion or whatever new energy was to follow fossil fuels, something went terribly wrong. Human ingenuity failed to conquer the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of nature.

Starting in the late 1960’s technological advancements other than computer science for the most part started to slow. More alarmingly for the Illuminated ones glorious plans, DECAY and ROT started appear in the countries that were under their complete control. It now appears that the engine of the NWO, the global banking system, is FAILING. The very ability to have an industrial civilization will be lost. The ability to feed the global population will be lost. When all these systems fail it will be as if a mighty dam has broken. Unless the Illuminati have magical powers or alien allies they will be scattered by the raging torrents. Just like every single other empire that has fallen so shall this empire fall. The structural support of this empire has been rotting away since peak oil per capita hit in 1979. The foundation is rotten and we will see it fall.

One thing all the media have in common is to refer constantly to how frigging stupid the technocrats and politicians such as Bernanke and Obama are. The NY Times (hypothetically – I haven’t read the (toilet) paper of record in years) does it subtly and demurely. The polite “alternative media” such as Chris Martenson may do it politely but less subtly. The blunt alternative media (TAE) says it bluntly. The snarky alternative media (Zero Hedge) says it with continuous sarcasm. But, in their own individual styles, they all say the same damn thing – that the Status Quo technocrats and pols are de facto idiots steering the global economy through sheer cowardice, lack of imagination, and stupidity into the jagged rocks.

Exactly. But unfortunately the de facto idiots are not the central bankers or their bossman shareholders, quasi human or otherwise, but rather the vast majority of the alternative financial media. (We all know that the MSM are not only idiots but presstitutes. Why beat a dead horse?) And there is a good reasons for this. Most of the alternative media, despite their individual foibles, even the ones who yell at their dogs after a hard day at the office, are essentially decent human beings and cannot imagine the minds of the true psychopaths who run our planet. They simply cannot envision, for example, intentionally destroying the beautiful Gulf of Mexico ecosystem, or causing millions of Japanese children to experience slow and painful deaths as they melt from radiation sickness and cancers. Yeah, it is a lack of imagination. But I cannot condemn humanity because this lack of imagination shows its basic decency. Perhaps the fact that I can imagine it shows a glaring, infested abscess in my personal spiritual make-up.

David Icke is a genius in many respects, but perhaps the greatest is his ability to translate the complex into simplicity for the Everyman without losing its substance. So Icke takes the abstruse Hegelian dialectic and translates it into Problem>Reaction>Solution. The Illuminati need a constant problem as the locomotive force for their agenda. The problem itself may vary depending on the arena. It may be 9/11 or it might be a currency that was born to fail. The one thing that the problem must do is generate great fear and panic among the muppets who then demand a solution. So like a true Aikido master, the Elites supply the solution, which always translates into a consolidation of its regional or global power. If it does not, that means that the Illuminati lost that hand at the poker table. But so far, they haven’t lost many. Of course, the solution is never The Solution. Which then forms the basis of the next iteration in their consolidation of power into a global, feudalistic police state.

So instead of ragging on with just how stupid Benjamin Shalom Bernanke is, let’s assume that he is totally brilliant and that things are proceeding exactly as he and his bosses planned. Let’s assume that not only are they brilliant, but that they have access to supercomputers that are damn close to Kurtzweil’s self-aware singularity. Then let us extrapolate the current solution and see how that leads to their consolidation of power, and of course, the development of the next huge problem. Even a mediocre chess player can run this at least six moves ahead, but I will leave that up to our accomplished readership since I was beaten at chess by a first generation Atari 2600 at level one 🙁

So as a challenge, I suggest that the DD readership reverse engineer the financial Illuminati’s “mistakes,” assume that they are not mistakes at all, and thereby reconstruct their actual agenda.

This post contains the substantive part of a debate held on Reverse Engineering in January of 2012, just before we openned the Diner for Bizness. The hypothesis being discussed is whether its possible that the decimation of the Native Population of the Americas through disease vectors was undertaken ON PURPOSE by the Illuminati.

I personally have further thoughts on this subject not included in these posts which have hit me since the original debate. I present the original debate here unedited for new readers to join in and further analyze this very provacative question.

RE

The problem I think with this was the Disease vectors. Even the failing exploratory ships that never returned probably made it to the coast, offloaded the crew who even after getting killed off delivered Smallpox to the area. Remember, though Columbus made the Islands in the Carribean in 1492, those first colonies didn’t get established in NA until the 1600s, a full century later. Did the Europeans really wait a full century to send more ships out this way? I doubt it. > > Basically it took abut 100 years for the Smallpox and other diseases to run unchecked through the native population, “softening” the defenses and leaving large swaths of the coastline to be defended by only a few Natives. It was essentially the first full scale Biological War of Genocide. –RE

Here is a nasty one to ponder on with respect to early colonialization.

What if during the interevening CENTURY of time between when Columbus “discovered” Amerika and the Jamestown Colny was founded in the 1600s British, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese PURPOSELY filled up ships with diseased people and sent then on a One Way trip to the New World, SPECIFICALLY with the purpose of infecting the Native Population with the diseases they had incubated over the years in Europe?

We KNOW that after arrival, the Europeans PURPOSEFULLY traded Smallpox Infected Blankets with the Natives, so why would they not have done the same thing from the very moment thye discovered the New World?

You got a bunch of Sick People, you put them on a ship out of your town and they have to head for the New World. Win-Win. You get the sick folks OUT of your community, and you infect and kill a vast number of people currently living on good land you can take over after they are all wiped out. You don’t expect them EVER to come back, and you don’t even record these voyages. They are just Biological Suicide Bombers!

I have now convinced myself in this argument that the Smallpox decimation of Native Americans in the period from 1500-1600 was undertaken DELIBERATELY by the Illuminati to empty the continent as much as possible of people. In 100 years, they took down the population this way from estimates of around 100M to just 2-3M people, without sacrificing ANYTHING other than some people who were gonna die anyhow! They didn’t try colonizing the continent until the Smallpox had done most of the dirty work already! Why ELSE wait 100 years here?

This was the first Biological War, and it was purposeful.

RE

Surly Wrote

Re: The First Biological War

There is a wonderful little book called “1491” by Charles Mann that addresses many of the myths we hold about the way the Americas were prior to the arrival of Columbus. It is an entertaining read, and I recommend it.

We are taught in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago in nomadic bands, and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. Mann puts the lie to these foundational myths. He reveals how a new generation of researchers with novel scientific techniques came to startling new conclusions. Among them:

–In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. –The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. –Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science called it “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.” –Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge. (Google “terra preta” ) –Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.

Mann talks about the disease vector as ell, speculating that as many as 95 per cent of the native population, with no resistance to smallpox, may have been eliminated. most of these people would have never laid eyes on a European. Intriguing.

As to whether the conquistadores were smart enough to wage biowarfare… I doubt it. I think they just got lucky in that regard. What is beyond doubt is that by the 19th century their Yankee brethren had figured that out… the first generation of Orkin Men?

Ross Wrote

Re: [reverseengineering] Re: The First Biological War

I don’t buy the biowarfare thesis for the extermination of the natives. It’s plausible, I suppose, but consider the knowledge of infectious diseases and “germs” at that point in history. It was non-existent. Drinking water with a meal would give you flu. It was still hocus-pocus and superstition.

The Native Americans might as well have been living on another planet in 1500. They never cohabited with domesticated livestock like the Euros and never had to develop immunity to crowd diseases like smallpox, measles, etc. that jumped the species boundaries in the European cities.

The Natives were simply unequipped biologically to handle the germs. A new virus that has a zero immunity amongst a population will spread like wild under most circumstances. Plenty of Europeans died of smallpox before the entire population achieved some level of biological resilience to the disease. The Natives never had the opportunity for a demographic recovery of smallpox survivors.

Funkyspec Wrote

Re: The First Biological War

Extensively covered by Jared Diamond in his book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which has also been turned into a multi-part PBS documentary, where they cover the use of smallpox as a biological weapon of mass destruction by the 16th century Europeans here: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html

I have a hard time believing that first few sets of early European explorers and their political/private business masters intentionally intended to infect Native American populations simply because they didn’t know about disease vectors or even the germ theory of disease.

I don’t think it really mattered, because ignorant or not, they still managed to wipe out huge swaths of population.

RE Wrote

Re: The First Biological War

This is one of those myths about ignorance like everyone thought the world was flat back then. Although these folks did not have microscopes and knew nothing of germs, they were quite aware sick people communicate disease. This is why going back to Biblical timer Lepers were isolated. During the Middle Ages, a common warfare techinque was to hurl Plague Infected corpses over the Castle Wall to get everyone inside the place infected with Plague.

You don’t think they wouldn’t try the same gimmick on the NA Continent? They ust had no clue how successful it would actually be, since the Natives here had no resistance to these diseases, nto having lived in the same environment in which they were incubated.

RE

Surly Wrote

To lapse serious for a moment, there was a book I read sometime ago whose name I cannot recall that discusses a Chinese “admiral of the high seas,” Cheng Ho, having lead an expedition supposedly to explore and colonize the entire world on behalf of the chinese emperor. Decades before Christopher Columbus sailed in search of a water route to Asia, according to this bookthe Chinese were exploring the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific with seven voyages of the “Treasure Fleet” that solidified Chinese control over much of Asia in the 15th century… This book too also offers an alternative view of history.

I tend to believe that the versions of history that we have been presented are incomplete, where they have not been bowdlerized or sanitized. For example, the book on Chinese exploration of identifies a number of genetic markers, both human animal and plants that are present through the Americans that are otherwise unable to be explained if not through colonization by the Chinese. Interesting stuff, that you are not surprised to know receives scant hearing among proessional mainstream explorers. I don’t know why mainstream historians should be so resistant to the idea of several immigration vectors to the Americas, as opposed to the Overland Bering Strait route, but then that’s not my field.

To address your other point, it is quite clear that our ethical or moral development has in no way kept pace with our scientific and technological development. This is our great failing as a species, and may well lead to our ultimate undoing, as has been plentifully discussed here.

S.

Surly Wrote

Indeed Ross, that is the thesis that Charles Mann explains in 1491. That the natives had resistance to fungus-based infections, whereas the Europeans had developed resistance to bacterial infections. He explains all this in great depth and detail, and with a compelling narrative that escapes me here. But it’s certainly worth reading and it’s interesting that he reaches an identical conclusion based on the evidence. Not sure if I made this point before, but Mann suggested as many as 19/20 Native Americans may have perished by the time the European settlers set foot in North America, most of them by disease, and most having never laid eyes on a European.

Surly Wrote

Re: The First Biological War

All of what you say is true enough, but I disagree about intent. Most of the first wave of Europeans were explorers, who shared the interest in gold of the bloodthirsty and notorious Spanish, but were more interested in taking stock of what was here and reporting back. I think the Europeans got “lucky” to have encountered a mostly empty continent when the waves of colonizers got here. The first French explorers who came up the Mississippi discovered a thriving city at cahokia. Some years later, when people retraced their steps, they discovered empty mounds.

My point is thus: that typically “first contact” does not result in a mission of extermination.

We leave that sort of thing to venture capitalists.

Ross Wrote

Yes, I’ve heard this Chinese exploration thesis before. Supposedly after the expeditions reported back on their findings the Empire found it suitable to shut the Empire until the Opium Wars forced them to open up.

What did the Japanese and Chinese find that convinced them they were better off shutting out the rest of the world?

I agree that history provides a social distortion and is misleading. “Recorded history” may be no more historically accurate than the Bible. Recent history provides visual evidence but even recent history is subject to interpretation and manipulation.

The implication that Europeans wiped out a culture that had deeply Asiatic roots, was populous and technologically advanced AND did it out of ignorance is … uncomfortable for the social narrative of American exceptionalism.

RE Wrote

Re: The First Biological War

To be honest, I think the Intentional Hypothesis WRT Biological Warfare in this case is fairly low probability. However, given the propensity here for Conspiracy Theories WRT the Elders of Zion, I figured I should pitch it out there as a possibility. If you are willing to accept the idea that these folks might unleash a variant of H1N1 on the current population to bring it down, its not a huge leap to consider that they might have done it before upon the discovery of the New World.

All they really needed to know was that disease could spread rapidly through contact with infected people, which they certainly knew after centuries/millenia of Plagues of various sorts. What better way to soften up the continent for subsequent Invasion?

The more likely probability is just one or two Spanish ships early on brought Smallpox first to South America, then it just rapidly spread up from there through a population with no previous exposure. The Mound Builders had many cultural similarities with the Central American tribes, and there was likely trade between them.

So, if this is true, then yes its mainly a matter of “luck” rather than intent that the native population had been so decimated by the time major colonization got underway. I still have some issues with the “missing Century” there though between Discovery and Colonization attempts. That was an awfully long time to wait to gain a foothold on the NA continent. Perhaps they were trying through the period, but there were just too many Natives around early on to safely set up a colony. They weren’t successful until the Smalpox had run its course all the way up the East Coast of NA.

I spent the last few Daily Rants examining the Past and what occurred during the Great Depression, and for now at least I think that subject has been exhaustively covered, at least with the data we have available to work with. So with this Daily Rant, I’m going to move out of the past and into the present and likely future.

In this area, the argument divides again into two fundamental camps, those who believe that Technology will come in to save the day and those who believe that the end of the Fossil fuel era will require humanity to REVERSE ENGINEER back to a lower energy footprint utilizing more sustainable technologies from the past. As with most of the critical debates we have, I hold up the less popular side of the debate, which is the power down side. For this post, rather than focus on whether or not we can replace the Oil with Nukes or Renewables or even Cold Fusion, I am going to argue the position that we shouldn’t even bother trying. Why? Because high technology while it has in some senses made some people’s lives easier, for the most part its negative consequences destroy the spiritual side of our lives and destroy our liberties. In a Cost-Benefit analysis, it is a loser.

I put up in the Daily Video spot the 1984 Super Bowl Commercial for the Macintosh Computer, aired only that one time on Network Television. It was such a fabulously POWERFUL commercial though that everyone who saw it remembers it. At the time, I still watched Super Bowls, so I did see it. It was probably the greatest TV Commercial ever produced. In 1 minute of time, it said about everything about the Zeitgeist of the time.

The commercial airs a powerful Image of George Orwell’s “1984”, with Male Drones glued to a Big Screen TV being Mind-Controlled by the Talking Head of Big Brother, all in Black & White. As the Commercial comes to a close though, an Athletic Olympian Female Athlete toting a Hammer comes running into the auditorium, herself in Technicolor. She is pursued by SWAT/Robocop style Police, but before being caught swings the Hammer in full Olympic Spinning style into the Big Screen TV. It blows the living shit out of the TV, metaphorically FREEING the drones from the Mind Control.

The idea being conveyed here was that the Personal Computer was going to FREE the minds of people from the medium of Television, which had reached its Zenith in 1984. The Technicolor of the Female Olympian was just like the Technicolor in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy moved from her drab life in Black & White Kansas of the Great Depression Era to the Free and Full Color life in the Land of Oz. But of course, in both Oz and in our own post-techno revolution computer age, that Freedom wasn’t real at all, and in fact TRAPPED Dorothy even more than the trap she was in back in the Black & White land of Kansas.

Have computers and the worldwide net REALLY freed us? Well, there is certainly a whole lot more information out there we can now access, and of course we are all free here now to Napalm the Living Shit out of each other on the pages of TBP as well. This is more or less a positive thing, but the DARK SIDE of this technology is much more powerful.

As a whole, all the technologically connected people of the world become ever more dependent on this technology, and their lives are ever more consumed by it. Everything you do or say through the medium is recorded, and everything recorded can and is filed in databases to identify who you are and how you think. Not just what you DO, but how you THINK. People create Facebook pages, which link them to all their friends, so when that Joe McCarthy style Purge comes, consider how easy it is now for Da Goobermint to not only nail you, but then by extension nail everyone you are connected to.

Every Transaction you make with a Credit Card or Debit Card is recorded. Your food preferences, your recreational choices, everything. As we move forward here if a technological society could continue, those cell phones you carry would be your transaction card, and they also carry with them a GPS chip which records your every move, so as long as you have it switched on, every place you go can be mapped out, along with the route you took to get there and how fast you were driving. And of course everyone ALWAYS has their cell phone ON, because you just MUST be connected! A friend might send you a TXT message, cannot miss that. They do not even need to implant Chips into people, the people will WILLINGLY carry their Tracking Units all the time to be connected to the Network. Because without that, they are not part of this type of community.

At the same time you have become part of this Global Interconnected Web Community though, you have given up your personal connections to people in your local community. I mean really, I KNOW people I work with who will walk around Texting friends totally GLUED to their Iphones. They are too busy doing that to talk to the person they are in the same room with.

For right now, there remains a certain amount of choice still, you can turn off your cell phone, you still can make transactions in Cash, you can still save some of it in the Bank of Sealy or bury it with a few ounces of Gold Dust and Diamond Rings in Denali National Park in a hermetically sealed PVC Pipe at a location only YOU have the Latitude and Longitude coordinates to and can find even without a GPS if necessary using just a Magnetic Compass, Watch and Sextant. If the Magnetic North Pole keeps migrating at 40 Miles/year, I’ll just have to rely on the Sextant and Watch and some dead reckoning on Geological features that don’t change too rapidly. Fortunately, the Stars don’t seem to be changing their positions too rapidly, so hopefully I can find the damn pipe with ¼ of my Savings when I need to. LOL. I have a good self-winding mechanical watch in case my digital ones get taken out by an EMP. My sextant is a nice Brass Reproduction of an 18th Century one made in India, reasonably accurate. Should be accurate enough to get me within a mile or so of the area, after which I can find my Buried Treasure by the local terrain features. I haven’t tried that yet though, but I’ll test it this summer when the weather improves. Wandering around Denali National Park in mid-winter is not a good idea unless you are a fucking good Jeremiah Johnson type, which I am not. It is a fucking HUGE place and you can quite easily get seriously LOST or trapped by bad weather. In the summer though, it is very pleasant. The rest of my Savings is distributed out ¼ in Digimoney in a Local Credit Union, ¼ in Anonymous Debit Cards/Pay Pal Accounts and ¼ in easily accessed cash in local storage spots. All the electronic money is immediately accessible as long as the network is up and running, and worth having available if for some reason cash goes no good. I am trying to cover both bases here 50-50, half cash, half electronic digibit money. The digimoney is half directly attributable to me, half anonymous in accounts only I have the password for but cannot be tied to me otherwise. This way, hopefully I do not get a 100% Wipeout of my savings regardless of how the crash proceeds before I can spend it into Hard Goods.

However, regardless of my eccentric Banking methods, in the industrialized countries, if the system was to be maintained after the collapse of the Dollar and all the rest of the Fiat currencies, it is almost certain that any new currency system centrally created would be 100% Digital, no Cash at ALL available to sequester in the Bank of Sealy. For this reason ALONE, I cannot support maintaining the technological grid of the Internet, but when you conjoin that with the fact that every last thing you write gets recorded and every last friend you have is recorded you can see where by accepting this system you accept Big Brother, WILLINGLY. You give up your autonomy by becoming a part of this vast interconnected electronic Web, and you become COMPLETELY dependent on it. The minute the Internet goes down for good, even under the quasi-choice system we have now; the minute you will have simply gobs of people completely LOST, like a Borg who has been cut off from the Collective. If/when it became effectively MANDATORY to be connected in this way, then when such connections are lost the people would really be in dire straights. They will have become so completely disconnected from the simpler means of living they simply will be unable to return to it. Like Dinosaurs faced with a radically changed environment, they will just helplessly die off.

There are people here I have chatted with, Plubius and Flash particularly who think that this is the road we are destined for. “1984” on Steroids where there is NO ESCAPE from the power of the Illuminati. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, because I do not in fact believe that these systems can be maintained in the post-Peak Oil world of the future. However, if it were true that we could in fact build enough Nukes or harness Cold Fusion to maintain this kind of structure, then I would have to agree with them that this would be our destiny. Technology is not liberating, it is ENSLAVING. Every last technology you accept and come to depend on enslaves you a little bit more. When you accept the Automobile as your transportation means, you become enslaved to the provider of the fuel for that automobile. When you accept the Light Bulb as your Light Source at night, you become enslaved to the Electricity Provider.

Who are the ONLY really FREE people left? They are the very few people still walking the earth who depend on NO technology other than their ability to make the few tools they need out of available materials they can pick up and who have knowledge enough to be able to fish for subsistence with the tools they make or find wild edible plants to eat in remote places that somebody else has not claimed the land they forage from as their own. The only way to be truly free is to be able to independently subsist in this way, and virtually no one can do this anymore. I know a few people who might be able to do it, but I am not one of them.

I do not advocate for that kind of freedom anyhow, I think people do need each other and can depend on each other in small groups of interdependence. The kind of Freedom I would like to see evolve here with the Failure of the Technological Conduits is one of small Communities and Tribes, not large Nation States. I believe that will come to pass with the collapse of the Age of Oil, and I would not hope for it to be replaced by Nuke Plants which would just perpetuate the central control paradigm and the loss of Freedom. THAT is why I am against Nuke Power, not because I am a big Tree Hugger, though of course I AM a Tree Hugger who values the natural ecosystems more than man made power sources. Big Nuke Power Plants give the POWER and Control over the society and the people in it to the few people who CONTROL the power plants. Once you come to depend on this, you are forever under their control. Only if you can GIVE IT UP can you be truly FREE.

To me, true FREEDOM is more important than the creature comforts we get by accessing great sources of thermodynamic power, which ALWAYS are controlled by a very few people in the society. There were others like me also through history, who walked away and rejected the trappings of the technological society of their time. The Jeremiah Johnsons, the Mutineers of the Bounty on Pitcairn Island, the John Dunbars who “went Native”. I haven’t walked so far away as that, mainly because I cannot anymore, not because I would not do it if I could. For younger folks in better health than I am though, I most certainly would recommend rejecting as much technology as you possibly can and becoming as self-sufficient as you can to become as FREE as you can.

This process does not have to come all at once, I wouldn’t suggest to anybody to smash their laptops and cell phones or junk their cars while it is all still working, and while in fact to live in the society we have now in the FSofA you really must use these tools. I certainly haven’t done that, I’m just trying to distance myself from it and prepare myself psychologically for the day Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You all these toys just don’t WORK anymore. That is why I wake up at the crack of dawn on a cold Saturday Morning to go out onto a lake on the Last Great Frontier to cut a hole in the ice and see what I can fish up. Do I do this EVERY day? Hell no, I don’t have to, nor could I since I have to wake up at the crack of dawn to go to my REAL JOB, which thankfully I still have. Thankfully also I still have a working 1989 Mazda MPV 4 wheel drive which brings me quickly in comfort to my job. Thankfully also I can still buy gas for it at the local convenience store for $3.80/gal. I don’t have to subsist on a daily basis from what I can fish up, I can drive over to Walmart and buy just tons of food shipped in from all over the world! I’ll sure miss that when it is gone, but at the same time I would be foolish not to prepare myself for the day it IS gone, as long as it is within my power to do so.

As we observe the turmoil developing throughout the Oil producing countries of the M.E., it is a foregone conclusion now that the Oil which powered our society is NOT going to be available in perpetuity to continue doing that. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to figure that one out. Nor is it very likely that even if possible would we be able to transition to alternate power sources fast enough to stop this type of technological society from coming to a screeching HALT. It is going to crash, and you can observe the crash in slow motion occurring, starting at the most peripheral economies and working its way inward toward the center. By cutting off vast populations of the earth from the remaining Oil, our Oil consumptive society may perpetuate a few more years, but equally possible is we will get a sudden STOP before that as the monetary system fails and societies go to WAR over the remaining resource. A War that cannot be won by anyone of course, but that does not mean it won’t be undertaken. That War is the last gasp of a dying technological paradigm, the Death Convulsions of a sick society.

For those of us born in the right place at the right time, for a couple of generations we got to Party like its 1999. Some folks became quite wealthy hitching a ride on this waste based paradigm of Production and Consumption, but they did so always at the expense of others or at the expense of the resources of the earth. You cannot make something from nothing of course. In the Blame Game of who is responsible for the mess we find ourselves in, it is all those people who took profit in this, who became manufacturers and industrialists, who controlled Da Goobermints and bought the politicians to serve their interests, who controlled the Banking system and created out of thin air the Money we all needed to make our way through this type of world. These are the people who are responsible, not J6P Union man who always was just trying to get a decent wage to live in the society and raise his kids. The Capitalists and Banksters and the Profiteers are the responsible ones for this collapse, and they must shoulder the blame for it. They must and will be put on Trial for their Crimes Against Humanity and Rape of Mother Earth. Eternal Justice will not be denied. When the Capitalist Inquisition is finished, whoever is left will then be able to build a Better Tomorrow.

There will be no George Orwell 1984 in the long term, we are already LIVING in that world NOW, and it is coming apart at the seams. It is made possible only by control over the vast thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels and the Conduits of transportation, communication and energy they support. When that energy is no more to be found at a positive EROEI, these Conduits will all collapse, and with that collapse will come the end of the control of the Illuminati. It will usher in a new age of FREEDOM, albeit with a vastly reduced population. You can’t make an Omellette without Breaking a few Eggs of course. When this Matrix falls apart, it will not be pretty.

Support the Diner

Search the Diner

Surveys & Podcasts

" As a daily reader of all of the doomsday blogs, e.g. the Diner, Nature Bats Last, Zerohedge, Scribbler, etc… I must say that I most look forward to your “off the microphone” rants. Your analysis, insights, and conclusions are always logical, well supported, and clearly articulated – a trifecta not frequently achieved."- Joe D

Why are you publishing this book now?I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis ...